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Assessing Each Meals Nutritional Status
In the second half of last year I wanted to optimise my time more and was thinking about how much time I spent around preparing food. I’ve seen this in the research, time is a key factor in food choice and when you have busy days and commitments sometimes you choose to turn to more convenient options which more often than not are less healthy. I wanted to see if there was a way to find a healthy meal prep service that somewhat met my goal of healthy food which could save me time. From memory I did this test for a month or two, below are my learnings about meal prep services.
Meal Size
I used one company for my test and then took a quick look at another company quickly for this blog post the meals sat in range of 1220 kJ (291 Calories) to 2110 kJ (504 calories) and ranging from 320g to 350g per meal. The average daily energy requirements for your an average 33 old are 11,989 kJ per day for men and 9,958 kJ per day for women. As you can see with these numbers if you had 3 of the large meals you wouldn’t meet your daily energy requirements. But we haven’t accounted for snacks/ food between meals. For my test to keep it on the healthier side, I wanted to stay away from processed snack foods so some of the things I tried were:
- Rice crackers with peanut butter
- Pre-boiling eggs for the week and eating on there own or with some avocado
- The ready to rice acks you can microwave for 2 minutes, they are mostly just pre cooked rice without too many preservatives, I also put this with avocado
- Heating up frozen vegetables and combining with the rice
- Cans of beans/lentils
- Fresh fruit
- Greek yoghurt and frozen berries (thawed)
- Smoothies for breakfast
These were chosen because they were quick to prepare as to not negate the whole point of this time saving exercise and for thier minimal salt content.
I can’t quite work it out but most meal prep companies don’t seem to be structured to support your whole week with meals, they often have plans that are 10,14, which are less than the 21 meals you would need and that is if they did provide your daily energy requirements. Some do have plans that are 20 meals and some are around $200 but others are pretty up there around $300 or more. Maybe the economics can’t support lower prices but it’s out of reach for most people once you factor in the extra snacks/meals you would need to get enough food each day.
Sodium Content
The suggested daily target of sodium for men and women in Australia over 18 years is 2,000 mg.1 The two meal prep services I looked at had sodium ranges of 568mg – 1560mg per meal. My plan was to stay close to 2000mg, ideally under that, so I chose all the meals from the meal prep service I was using that were around the 500 – 1000mg of sodium per meal. This meant only using 2 meal prep meals per day as these two meals were pretty high in sodium and they didn’t provide 2/3 of the days energy requirements. It meant that if I wanted to keep my sodium in a good range, it meant my supplementary meals couldn’t be seasoned with salt and only provide the sodium that was naturally occurring in those foods meaning those supplementary meals were going to be a bit blander.
Assessing Each Meals Nutritional Status
Now a few of my recent uni subjects have given me exposure to Eat For Health’s serving sizes for different food groups,2 and the recommended daily serves for each food group,3 for eg a serve of vegetables is about ½ cup of cooked vegetables (about 75g) and the recommended serves per day for men my age is 3 and for women is 2 and a half. As I had been trying to incorporate these into my diet you can kind of visually take an estimated guess of what a serve is. When looking at the the meal prep service I chose the average meal has 1 – 2 servings of vegetables (some have 4), but when you look at the meal there is not a lot of vegetables in the bowl, granted when vegetables are cooked they shrink but I wasn’t sure and so you are basically trusting that this is correct. The other meal prep service didn’t advertise the vegetable serves which I thought was interesting.
The other thing to note is that these companies often say designed but Dieticians/nutritionists etc… but I am not so sure. Maybe the people in these roles are having to compromise so meals are tasy and actually sell. But when you look at some of the meals offered for eg. Lamb kofta curry, vegetable stew with chicken, and roast chicken with vegetables. Some of the meals have some vegetables but other meals are more just tasty meals such as cannelloni, and lasagna.
As a nutrition student I wanted to make sure the meals would help to meet my nutritional needs and see exactly how much these meals would contribute to each nutrients daily requirement but what I worked out was there isn’t a clear way to do this. According to Food Standards Australia New Zealand (FSANZ) the nutrition panel has to provide information about protein, fat, saturated fat, carbohydrates, sugar, and sodium and only if a claim is made about any of the other nutrients is made do they need to be shown in the nutritional panel.4 So from this we know exactly the macros but nothing else but not the other stuff. I tried to reverse engineer using the total weight in grams of the meal, the percentage of the foods to work out the other nutrients. FSANZ also states that only the key ingredients are required to have a percentage listed in the ingredients list.5 This means you only know the exact percentage for the main couple of ingredients and even then vegetables can get bundled into the same percentage. So I quickly realised its not really possible you just have to hope your meeting your nutritional needs. You could also just evaluate the diet as a whole, ie using these meals I have selected is there a good variety of different vegetables across the week. I would say there probably isn’t as a lot of the meals use a narrow range of vegetables ie broccoli, carrot, and corn.
Price
The meal prep service I used had meals priced at $11.95 and $12.95 so for 14 meals (lunches and dinners) that base cost was $174.3, but most meal prep services sell meals for around $10 – $13 each. Then a weeks worth of shopping for the supplementary meals I bought was around $40 – $70 each week. So the total then can be up around $244 each week. This is not too bad compared to just doing a regular shop, it depends what you eat but for me was about $100 more than I would usually spend.
Conclusion
As far as I can work out meal prep services are not really a practical or healthy long-term solution to fully replace buying groceries and cooking your meals. But in comparison to buying fast food they are a healthier, more convenient option so it does make sense to grab one of these from the supermarket if it you are very short on time one day.
If you are someone who is focused on building a business or your career, studying or just want more time with family, you could make the choice for meal prep meals long term and its just that, a choice a trade-off. We all make trades, I just think we should know the trades we’re making.
References
- eatforhealth.gov.au. (n.d.). Sodium. Nutrient Reference Values. https://www.eatforhealth.gov.au/nutrient-reference-values/nutrients/sodium
↩︎ - eatforhealth.gov.au. (n.d.). Serve Sizes. How Much Do We Need Each Day?. https://www.eatforhealth.gov.au/food-essentials/how-much-do-we-need-each-day/serve-sizes
↩︎ - eatforhealth.gov.au. (n.d.). Recommended number of serves for adults. How Much Do We Need Each Day?. https://www.eatforhealth.gov.au/food-essentials/how-much-do-we-need-each-day/recommended-number-serves-adults
↩︎ - Food Standards Australia New Zealand. (2025). Nutrition Information Panels. https://www.foodstandards.gov.au/consumer/labelling/panels
↩︎ - Food Standards Australia New Zealand. (2025). Ingredient lists and percentage labelling. https://www.foodstandards.gov.au/consumer/labelling/ingredients
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