Guide
Meal kits or meals that arrive cooked?
A meal kit hands you the groceries and the recipe. A cooked meal hands you dinner. Here's how to tell which one your week is asking for.
in short
A meal kit sends you measured ingredients and a recipe, so it suits people who enjoy cooking on weeknights. BetterDay cooks your meals in our Calgary kitchen and our own team delivers them on Sunday, ready to heat, for the weeks when cooking after work is the part you want gone.
Conner KadziolkaUpdated 3 min read
A meal kit sends you the groceries and the recipe, and you do the cooking. A cooked meal skips that part and sends you dinner. Both show up at your door, so they get lumped together, but they fix different problems.
I've tried a meal kit myself, and I keep hearing the same few reasons from people who stopped. Cooking a new recipe after a long workday started to feel like a second shift. A red pepper or a bunch of herbs went soft in the fridge before its recipe came up. And after a few months, the recipes started to look awfully familiar.
Meal kits are good at what they do. It just helps to know what that is before you pick one.
A meal kit suits people who love to cook
you do the cookingIf cooking is the part of the evening you look forward to, a kit is a great fit, and we'd tell you so ourselves. You get measured ingredients and a recipe, so there's no shopping list and no half jar of something left at the back of the fridge. You still chop, cook and wash up, and for a lot of people that hour in the kitchen is the whole point.
Where a kit gets hard is the week that doesn't go to plan. The ingredients arrive on a schedule and start waiting for you. If Thursday turns into takeout, Thursday's produce starts to turn as well.
Reach for it in
- Learning new dishes
- Cooking with the kids
- Slow evenings at home
Cooked meals suit the weeks you'd rather not
you heat and eatThis is what we do at BetterDay. Our chefs cook every meal in our kitchen in northeast Calgary, then we chill it, seal it and label it, and our own team brings the whole week to your door on Sunday. Most meals heat in the microwave or on the stovetop, with the heating notes right on the label. There's nothing to chop and no produce sitting in the crisper waiting for its turn.
Repeating recipes is the other thing people mention, and our menu changes every week. You pick your meals before Friday, and you can swap a Halifax Hero Donair Bowl for a Herb Roasted Chicken Alfredo and change your mind again as often as you like until then.
The trade is that you give up the cooking. If you love that hour at the stove, you'll miss it. And because we deliver on Sundays, we can't help with dinner tonight.
We deliver across Calgary and the towns around it, and our team drives up Highway 2 to every postal code in Edmonton.
Reach for it in
- Late workdays
- Packed lunches
- Busy family weeks
Four questions before you choose
How many nights you want to cook
If you want to cook four or five nights a week, a kit gives you something new to make each time. If it's one or two, cooked meals can cover the rest.
What your fridge looks like on Friday
If you keep finding a soft pepper or limp herbs at the end of the week, the ingredients are arriving faster than you're cooking them.
Whether you miss the cooking or the variety
When a kit's recipes start to feel familiar, ask which one you'd actually miss. If it's the cooking, a different kit might bring it back. If it's the variety, a weekly menu does that job.
How far ahead you plan
Cooked meals arrive on Sunday for the week ahead, so they reward a little planning. They won't rescue a night you forgot about.
On the menu this week
Entrées
Halifax Hero Donair Bowl
Your go-to 2:00 AM classic, reimagined the Betterday way. Tender marinated beef, thinly shaved and served over golden shawarma-spiced rice, mixed with punchy pickled turnip, pickles, tomatoes, and sweet onions, served with creamy tzatziki potatoes & sweet garlic sauce.
On this week’s menu
Entrées
Herb Roasted Chicken Alfredo
The longest serving and most popular dish on our menu, for a damn good reason. Velvety cashew-based Alfredo sauce paired with our herb-roasted chicken, served on penne and topped with arugula.
On this week’s menu
Read next
- Seven ways to throw out less food
A third of the world's food gets thrown away. Most of the fix is storage and a list.
- A customer sent us photos to ask if her chicken was chicken
She had ordered the plant-based version. She could not tell. The reason is more interesting than the mix-up she thought she had found.
- Why the calories on a label never add up
Multiply the protein and carbs by four and the fat by nine, and you'll almost never land on the calories printed on the label. Fibre, rounding and digestion explain the gap.
Rather not cook tonight?