Daily Harvest Review

Daily Harvest is a meal delivery service that focuses on nourishment through organic frozen fruits and vegetables. The company was created in 2016 by founder and CEO Rachel Drori, who sought to make eating fruits and vegetables more accessible in order to empower healthier habits.

The meal service offers smoothies, oat bowls, soups, and flatbreads with minimal prepping effort. The options are entirely vegan and without the use of artificial flavors, fillers, gums, refined sugars, and stabilizers. We ordered and tested some of the company's meals and outlined our thoughts on the service below.

How It Works: Choose Your Plan to Build Your Box

Daily Harvest focuses on plant-based meals that are nutrient-rich, simple to prepare, and ready to consume in minutes. This service has a variety of meals to heat, smoothies to blend, and some ready-to-eat choices. Subscription plans are weekly and monthly, and there are three plans to choose from: small (9 options), medium (14 options), and large (24 options). You can load up your cart using the various filters to add up to the total number of meals to match your plan.

The number of items can be customized in the managed plans section of the menu, and you can also customize your weekly delivery dates. The seamless process requires your zip code and email address in order to select your plan.

Pricing: Low Starting Point

Daily Harvest does not indicate pricing until you reach the checkout screen, after you've built your box with meals. Plans start at $6.79 each for forager bowls and up to $11.99 for harvest bakes. The plan you choose will determine how many items you need to build your box. There are also volume-based discounts where the more you buy, the more you save. And, for an added bonus, all orders include free shipping. 

Per-Item Pricing:

• Lattes: $5.99
• Forager Bowls: $6.79
• Mylk & Bites: $7.99
• Smoothies & Soups: $8.49
• Scoops: $8.99
• Harvest Bowls & Flatbreads: $9.79
• Harvest Bake: $11.99

Volume Discounts:

• 9-11 items: $5 discount
• 12-23 items: $10 discount
• 24-26 items: $25 discount

Choosing Meals: Harvest Your Meals

Daily Harvest menu has 12 categories of meal options and around 100 options available that make plant-based meals more accessible. The meals are built on the idea of supplying nourishing fruits and vegetables that are delicious and crafted by the company's in-house chefs and nutritionists. Each meal features raw flavors with real ingredients that aim for functional and nutritional benefits.

At the time we tested Daily Harvest offered two mylk options, three forager bowls, three chia bowls, four bite snacks, four latte flavors, seven oat bowls, seven scoops (ice cream), eight flatbreads, 11 soups, 21 harvest bowls, and 27 smoothies. The company added a line of harvest bakes to its menu in January of 2022, consisting of four different options.

To cater to your personal dietary preferences, the menu has a filter at the top of the page to manage which foods you like and dislike, along with dietary needs such as gluten-free, keto, low carb, high protein, low calorie, low sugar, Paleo, and vegan.

There aren't any add-ons or customization of meals outside of their menu. Deliveries are adjustable as long as you edit or skip before the cutoff, which is the Sunday before your order arrives at 6 p.m. ET.

What We Made

We selected a variety of menu items, including smoothies, soups, flatbreads, and harvest bowls, to get a sense of how well Daily Harvest executed its meals. Here's what we ordered:

• Mint and cacao smoothie
• Mango papaya smoothie
• Hazelnut and chocolate bites
• Tomatillo and pepper flatbread
• Portobello and pesto flatbread
• Sweet potato and wild rice hash
• Brussels sprouts and tahini harvest bowl
• Spinach and shiitake grits
• Tomato and zucchini minestrone soup

Packaging: Minimal Wrapping

Daily Harvest meals arrive frozen with the help of dry ice and a well-insulated liner. We liked the simplicity and the minimal use of materials in the packaging. The soups, forager bowls, and harvest bowls all arrived in molded pulp containers with a plastic seal covered around a paper sleeve with the meal’s ingredients, cooking instructions, and nutrition facts. The flatbreads come in cardboard boxes with a tightly wrapped flatbread on a bed of a piece of cardboard for a total of three packaging pieces per meal. Everything was kept frozen even though it wasn’t opened immediately after arriving.

In total, our Daily Harvest order contained 33 individual pieces of packaging. Of those 33 pieces, 31 were eligible for recycling either curbside or at a special facility. There were only two pieces that needed to be thrown in the trash and sent to a landfill.

Customer Support: Accessible and Courteous

Daily Harvest delivers your meals as is with no additional recipe cards or bits of information. They also have an app that can be used to manage your account. The website layout is mostly easy to navigate and offers searchable FAQs for customers to find answers to their questions. Customer support can be reached every day from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. ET via email, chat box, text, and phone.

We asked customer service via email about the use of dietitians or other experts in nutrient analysis and menu building. The response came on the same day and included details about the combination of in-house chefs and nutritionists who design the company's meals. We also opened a chat box with a care team associate who was very helpful and offered an almost immediate response to an inquiry about what dietary guidelines were used to determine diets such as keto on the menu.

Nutrition: Hard to Beat Nutritional Value

As previously mentioned, Daily Harvest is built entirely on veganism and omits any additives, preservatives, or fillers. The meals feature frozen fruits and vegetables and therefore are said to have more bioavailable nutrients and offer greater health benefits. All Daily Harvest products are free of gluten and dairy, and most items are soy-free as well.

Although the menu allows you to filter based on dietary needs such as keto and Paleo, the company does not mention any guidance pertaining to the dietary eating patterns offered. Similarly, you can filter to single out ingredients that you like or dislike, though Daily Harvest cannot modify items to accommodate allergies such as nuts. There is, however, a filtering system to set your food preferences.

Daily Harvest says all of its food is gluten-free, but note that the meals are made in a facility that processes nuts, soy, dairy, and gluten.

The Cooking Process: Simply Reheat

The cooking process was pretty intuitive being that the meals were frozen; they were essentially heat-and-eat, per the instructions on the packaging, which involves simply reheating in the oven, microwave, or skillet. The flatbreads require 20 or so minutes in the oven at 450°F. The smoothies required the addition of a liquid, such as almond or oat milk, before being poured into a blender to blend. The soups and harvest bowls are both microwaveable, and they can also be warmed on a stovetop for 4-5 minutes to reheat.

Flavor, Freshness, and Quality: Frozen Fresh at Peak Harvest

The foods we received were consistently fresh and of excellent quality. The flatbreads featured some interesting ingredient pairings, though it's worth mentioning that some soups lacked the comforting savory and robust flavors that you would expect from a soup. We paired the harvest bowls and soups with other meals to compensate for the lack of flavor.

Daily Harvest says it sources produce at peak ripeness and then freezes items within hours to lock in the nutrients and flavors. In addition, Daily Harvest commits to featuring 95% organic ingredients, and all products listed under the Environmental Working Group's Dirty Dozen are always organic.

Daily Harvest Is Good For

Daily harvest is suited for vegetarians/vegan singles or couples who focus on plant-based nutrition. It is also a convenient way to eat more fruits and vegetables for someone looking to start healthy eating habits. There is little cooking required, and food can be ready to eat in no time. However, this may not be the best choice for individuals seeking omnivore menu options and traditional flavors. It may also be challenging for someone on a high-protein diet.

Methodology

We ordered, cooked, and evaluated meals from 40 different meal delivery services to rate each one’s offerings, nutrition profiles, prices, sustainability, and, of course, flavors. We contacted the customer service teams at each of the companies, collected data, and rigorously reviewed each one.

Our Verywell Fit writers are all registered dietitians who relied on their research and its resulting data to inform their reviews.