If you follow a gluten-free diet, it can be challenging to plan your meals and find delicious food options with substitute ingredients. The good news is that you can use gluten-free meal delivery services to make your meal plan easy and convenient.
Freshly gluten-free meal service offers ready-made gluten-free meals delivered straight to your door every week. The service promises healthy meals, but are they everything they promise?
Our team gave Freshly’s gluten-free meal delivery service a try. In this review, you can read more about it.
What is Freshly Gluten-free Meal Plan?
Freshly is a prepared meal delivery service that specializes in ready-to-eat gluten-free food. It’s more convenient than a meal kit service because you get to eat meals already cooked by experienced chefs. You don’t have to spend about 30 minutes preparing each meal. All you have to do is heat the meal in the microwave for about 3 minutes to prepare.
While it may feel like you are just ordering take-out that is gluten-free, Freshly is so much better because the food is natural and healthy. Using this service is also much better than cooking for yourself, especially if you have a hectic schedule.
There are many meal options, and these cater to people with different diet preferences and restrictions. No gluten-containing foods are used, so if you are strictly gluten-free, Freshly is a good option. The meals on offer are conveniently grouped into various menu categories—namely Crafted Classics, Signature Collection, FreshlyFit, and Takeout Twists. The menu includes dairy-free meals, high-protein meals, and soy-free meals. for the time being, there are no options if you are vegan or vegetarian.
Freshly delivers meal plans with either four, six, 10, or 12 meals per week. You just have to decide if you want to eat meals from Freshly for your lunches and dinners. Each meal plan is specially designed for one adult, but you can always select a more extensive program or multiply your subscription if you are ordering for more than one person.
Freshly delivers everywhere in the continental United States, and delivery takes place every day. Meals are delivered once a week on the preferred date of delivery you choose when placing your first order.
If you are ordering meals for someone else, such as a new parent or something who needs a bit of care and love, Freshly makes it easy to do so. There is a gift section on its website, which allows you to gift meals. You can order any of the gluten-meal options, keeping the person’s food preferences in mind. The meals are then delivered to their home address in any state in the United States.
We will break down everything that the service offers and what you can expect when you try it. We hope that can help you decide whether or not to try Freshly out for yourself. You probably have many questions about what meal plans are available, how delicious the food is, and whether you can get free delivery in the United States.
Is Freshly Gluten-Free Certified?
Yes, they are.
Every meal from Freshly is 100% certified gluten-free by the Gluten Intolerance Group (GIG). This is excellent news for anyone with any form of gluten sensitivity. To prevent cross-contamination, no gluten ingredients such as wheat or rye ever enter the Freshly kitchens.
About one out of 100 people have celiac disease, which is an immune response to the gluten protein found in many grains. Anyone with gluten intolerance can enjoy every menu item on all of the Freshly meal plans.
Freshly’s innovative chefs also recreate many traditional gluten dishes with high-nutrient substitutes. This “stealth health” approach allows you to enjoy meals with creative high-quality ingredients like wheat-free noodles, cauliflower rice, and almond meal “breading.”
What Are the Benefits of Freshly Gluten-free Meal Service?
When we looked at all that Freshly has to offer, we found several excellent benefits. Here are the notable ones we want to bring to your attention.
Gluten-free certified
All Freshly meals have gluten-free certification. You don’t have to double-check each meal package because this applies to every meal from Freshly.
Prepared meals for easy meal prep
The meals are cooked by chefs and approved by nutritionists. All you have to do is heat them in a microwave for about 3 minutes.
Health in mind
Freshly meals are healthy for your body. With smart food substitutions, you can enjoy nutrient-dense meals from the comfort of your home, with no cooking at all. You don’t have to substitute nutrition for taste.
Flexibility
There is an option to skip a week, switch a plan, or cancel your subscription plan at any time. You can select four, six, 10, and 12 meals per week and that at any time as your needs change. It’s easy to upgrade or downgrade your meal plan on the website or the easy-to-use Freshly app.
Ample choices every week
Freshly changes its menu offering regularly, and you can pick from over 30 gluten-free options of all-natural foods. You can also find dairy-free, high-protein, and soy-free options from among these.
Affordable price
compared to other similar food service options, Freshly gives you about 10% more food in each 13-ounce meal. The meal plans also come with a discounted meal price, so they are worth considering if you become a weekly subscriber to Freshly’s gluten-free meal delivery service.
Our Experience With Freshly Gluten-free Food
We heard a lot about Freshly’s service, so was excited to order some meals for ourselves. We signed up for the basic plan offering four meals weekly. Once we placed our order and selected our preferred delivery day, we made the payment, including a small shipping fee. We enjoyed using the Freshly app because this made the home process convenient and easy to follow.
The food arrived in a medium-sized box, and all the packaging was well-branded. We love the fact that the packaging is eco-friendly. Freshly gives some great tips about disposing of the packaging once you are done with your meals.
Now, we will give you a little more info on our experience with some of the meals we tried from Freshly. All the meals were fresh and ready to heat and eat in 3 minutes.
All in all, we had a great experience using the service for ourselves.
Chicken Livorno With Hearty White Beans and Kale
For a high protein meal with under 500 calories per serving, we tried the chicken Livorno dish. It is also dairy-free and soy-free. We loved that this meal didn’t have regular carbs—instead, it was full of high-quality beans and vegetables. The lean chicken also made this a very healthy meal option.
As far as the flavor, there were some great herbs for a characteristic delicate Italian taste, and the chicken breast was tender and moist.
If you are looking for a naturally gluten-free meal with plenty of vitamin C and beta-carotene antioxidants, then we recommend this dish.
White Bean Turkey Chili Bowl With Basmati Rice and Cheddar Cheese
If you like a good chili bowl, then this dish is a must-try. We thought this meal’s ingredients looked interesting, so we decided to add this to our order. We enjoyed the double protein combined with the turkey and white beans.
The dish had a lot of great flavors from the spice combination and the slow cook. There was a creaminess to this heart-warming dish that we are calling a feel-good dish. We loved the fluffy basmati rice. It’s the perfect option for someone wanting a pleasant dish with unique ingredient options but without the hassle of putting it together by themselves. This has 540 calories per meal.
Sausage and Peppers With Carb Swap Cauliflower Rice
We enjoyed the carb swap in this 500 calorie Italian-American staple meal. With the cauliflower rice, this sausage and pepper dish was also paleo-friendly, dairy-free, soy-free and gluten-free.
This dish was flavorful and pleasantly sweet yet spicy, with lots of great classic Italian flavors. It’s also highly nutritious with five vegetables and lots of great herbs.
If you like a clever twist on a delicious dish, like often done in Freshly meals, we highly recommend this one. The heat-up instructions were easy to follow.
Other Recommended Gluten-free Meals to Try
There are so many excellent meal choices you can try if you are looking to eat healthier with less processed ingredients. Here are eight more of our top picks. You can find something delicious, regardless of any other diet restrictions you have.
- Sierra Chicken Bowl with Cilantro-Lime Sauce
- Hearty Chipotle-Chicken Stew with Black Beans and Monterey Jack
- K-Town Pork and Purple Sticky Rice
- Chicken Tikka Masala with Seven-Spice Vegetarian Biryani
- Due South Barbeque Beef with Masterful Mac and Cheese
- Rutabaga Alla Vodka with Turkey-Mushroom Meatballs and Kale Sauté
- Ultra-Umami Turkey Meatloaf with Creamed Spinach and Carb Swap Cauli Mash
- Olé Chicken and Smoky Chile Sauce with Veggie Sauté and Sofrito Rice
Is Freshly Really Healthy?
Freshly focuses on delivering meals that are not just gluten-free and delicious—they are also very healthy. In the company’s food philosophy, there are three main highlights. These are less sugar, less processed foods, and more nutrients.
Many ready-made meal services use various preservatives to extend the shelf-life of their products. With Freshly, all the meals are delivered fresh and not frozen, and no chemical preservatives are used. If you wish to keep your Freshly food longer, you can refrigerate it for a few days according to the use-by-day or freeze them before that date to preserve the meals even longer.
Freshly substitutes popular ingredients for healthier options. Instead of heavy creamy for those thick creamy dishes, you might see some mashed squash or cauliflower. In place of flour to thicken up that gravy, Freshly uses nut butter. For dishes that require a bit of sweetness, the chefs at the Freshly kitchen use honey instead.
To make sure that you get many lean and healthy proteins, Freshly chefs rotate red meat dishes with leaner options like chicken and pork. They also add foods like mushrooms and carrots into ground meat dishes, to get an extra taste and extra veggies on your menu. The Freshly culinary team also has fun doing some carb swapping to reduce the calorie component of the meals and ensure you are getting more nutrients. One example of this is the addition of some low-carb cauliflower into mashed potato dishes.
All Freshly meals range from 350- 600 calories, which the average calorie count is 500. Other dietary preferences are accommodated, including dairy-free and peanut-free diets. Freshly customer service also invites people to contact them if they need help understanding the ingredient list and finding meal options that work well for their specific diets.
Bottom Line – Do We Recommend This Gluten-Free Meal Delivery Plan?
We highly recommend Freshly for anyone on a strict gluten-free food diet or who just wants to eat healthily. Many meal delivery services offer only a limited range of gluten products, but Freshly has many delicious options and a creative twist to popular dishes. All the meals are gluten-free. We love the thoughtful additional option from freshly to gift meals. This can certainly come in handy when you want to treat or take care of a friend or family member in a different city or state.
We rank them as one of the best gluten-free meal delivery services. We love the variety of options and the flexibility about how many meals you receive per week and the option of skipping or canceling the service when you want to.
You can save a lot of time and money when you use this amazing gluten-free meal delivery.
