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A vegetarian meal kit costs between roughly $12.75 and $16.25 a plate in 2026, shipping included — which is about $2,650 to $5,070 a year at one two-person box a week. The price gap between the options is real, but it isn’t the question that decides this.
The question is how many vegetarian dinners you actually get to choose from each week. On a general meal kit, the answer can be three.
The two ways to buy a vegetarian meal kit
There are two kinds of service, and they fail in opposite directions.
A fully plant-based service — Purple Carrot is the main one — puts every dinner on the menu within reach. You never scroll past steak to find the one tofu dish. You pay for that at the per-serving level.
A general service with vegetarian options — Home Chef, HelloFresh, Green Chef and the rest — is cheaper per plate, but the vegetarian menu is whatever fraction of the full menu happens to be meat-free that week. If that fraction is small, you’re paying for a variety you can’t use.
Purple Carrot: every dinner is plant-based, and it’s priced like it
Purple Carrot’s storefront on 28 September 2026 listed its two-person meal kits at $28.50, or $14.25 a serving. Its help centre’s “Plans & Pricing” page gives the range across plans as $13.25 to $14.25 per serving, sold as three 2-serving kits or two 4-serving kits a week.
Shipping, from the same help centre: free on orders of $120 or more, otherwise a $12 fee, with a $15 surcharge in some zip codes that shows up in the cart.
Here’s the standard two-person box, three dinners a week:
| Amount | |
|---|---|
| 6 servings × $14.25 | $85.50 |
| Shipping (under $120) | $12.00 |
| Weekly total | $97.50 |
| Per plate | $16.25 |
| Per year (52 weeks) | $5,070 |
That $12 fee adds $2 to every plate, and it’s the easiest cost on this page to remove.
The $120 line
The standard box lands $34.50 short of free shipping. A four-serving family box gets much closer: two 4-serving kits is 8 servings, which comes to $106 at $13.25 a serving or $114 at $14.25. Purple Carrot’s pages give the range but don’t say which plan sits at which end of it, so we’re showing both.
Either way, you’re then between $6 and $14 short of $120. Adding that much from Purple Carrot’s grocery shelf — the storefront lists items from $3.99 — removes the $12 shipping fee. If you’d use the extra food anyway, the add-on costs you somewhere between $6 less and $2 more than the shipping it replaces. On the $114 version, it’s a straight saving.
Before you top up a cart to dodge a fee, check it’s food you’d have bought. Spending $14 to save $12 on something you throw away is how “free shipping” costs you money.
Home Chef: cheaper, if you can live with its vegetarian menu
Home Chef advertises dinner kits from $7.99 a serving and says standard meals average $9.99. Both figures are on homechef.com.
It’s the menu that matters. On the menu Home Chef displayed on 28 September 2026, we counted every kit tagged Vegetarian across its three meal-kit sections:
| Section | Dinner kits | Tagged Vegetarian |
|---|---|---|
| Meal Kits | 13 | 2 |
| Express | 13 | 1 |
| Oven-Ready | 11 | 0 |
| Total | 37 | 3 |
Three out of thirty-seven. Home Chef’s minimum order is two meals of two servings, so a vegetarian couple on the smallest plan picks two of those three. On a three-meal plan, they take all three and have no choice at all. Its heat-and-eat meals are no rescue: all twelve listed that week contain meat.
That count is one week’s menu, and it will move. But a single week is a fair picture of what a mixed menu does to vegetarians: most of what you’re shown isn’t for you.
What that smallest order costs
Home Chef publishes two different figures for its minimum order, and we can’t tell you which is current:
- Its homepage FAQ says the minimum weekly order including shipping is $50.95.
- Its gift-card help article says the minimum — “two meals at two servings, or four plates” — costs $58.95.
So four vegetarian plates cost $12.74 to $14.74 each, or $2,649 to $3,065 a year at one box a week. Home Chef doesn’t state its shipping fee on any page we could read. Assume your real figure is in that range and check it at checkout.
Even at the top of that range, it’s $1.51 a plate cheaper than Purple Carrot. Across four plates a week, that’s $6.04 a week, or $314 a year. That’s what you save by accepting a menu with three vegetarian dinners on it.
Green Chef: a plant-based plan, but no price we could confirm
Green Chef offers a “Plant Based” preference, described on its plans page as vegan and vegetarian meals, and sells plans of 2, 4 or 6 servings. Its own FAQ gives shipping as a flat $9.99 per box and says its weekly premium meal costs $6.99 to $9.99 more per serving.
What it doesn’t give is the base price. Green Chef puts its per-serving pricing behind a zip-code form, and we don’t enter personal details to get a quote. We couldn’t confirm Green Chef’s per-serving price on its own pages, so we haven’t guessed one. If you’re considering it, get the quote and run it through the sum below. The $9.99 shipping works out to $1.67 a plate on a six-serving box or $2.50 on a four-serving box.
How to work out your own number
Every figure above comes from the same sum, and it’s the one to run before you sign up:
(servings × price per serving + shipping) ÷ servings = real price per plate
Weekly total × 52 = what a year costs
Then do a second sum that nobody puts on their pricing page: how many dinners on this week’s menu would you actually eat? Count them before you pay. If the answer is fewer than your plan orders, you’ll be eating repeats or skipping weeks, and skipped weeks are when people forget to cancel.
The intro discount doesn’t change any of this. Purple Carrot’s current sign-up coupon takes $25 off orders of $65 or more, up to $100 across four orders — useful, but it ends. Our intro offers breakdown shows why the full price is the only one worth judging on.
The verdict
Best for vegans, and vegetarians who want real choice: Purple Carrot. It’s the only one of the three where the whole menu is yours. At $16.25 a plate on the standard box, it’s also the most expensive. Aim for the $120 free-shipping line if you can reach it with food you’d buy anyway.
Best for a household that eats meat some nights: Home Chef. Three vegetarian dinners a week is thin for a vegetarian, but fine for someone who wants two meat-free nights. At $12.74–$14.74 a plate, it’s cheaper than Purple Carrot by about $314 a year on the smallest plan.
Green Chef: get a quote first. Its plant-based plan exists and its shipping is published, but with no per-serving price we can’t say where it lands.
Who should skip all of them:
- Vegetarians on Home Chef expecting a menu. Paying for a 37-dinner menu to choose from three is the worst deal on this page.
- Anyone who already cooks beans, lentils and tofu at home. Plant-based cooking is some of the cheapest cooking there is, so the meal-kit markup is at its widest here. At $16.25 a plate you’re mostly paying for planning, not ingredients. If planning doesn’t bother you, the budget kits and even takeout comparisons show how much of that price is convenience.
- One person eating alone. Minimum orders are built for two. Our meal kit for one person maths applies here too, and it’s worse at a $14 base price.
Verified 28 September 2026. Purple Carrot’s $28.50 kit price, $14.25 per serving, $13.25–$14.25 plan range, $120 free-shipping threshold, $12 shipping fee, $15 surcharge and sign-up coupon terms were read from purplecarrot.com and Purple Carrot’s help centre that day. Home Chef’s $7.99 and $9.99 per-serving figures, its $50.95 minimum and the vegetarian count come from homechef.com; the conflicting $58.95 minimum is from Home Chef’s support site. Home Chef does not publish its shipping fee where we could read it. Green Chef’s $9.99 shipping and premium-meal surcharge are from greenchef.com; its per-serving price is behind a zip-code form and we have not stated it. Menus change weekly, so vegetarian counts are for one week only. We analyse published pricing and terms; we don’t test meal kits.