CookUnity Prepared Meal Delivery Review (2025): Chef-Centric Meals Leave a comment

It should not be shocking if a plate of hen lababdar tastes scrumptious. The dish is amongst my favourite North Indian gravies, a barely edgier cousin of butter hen that is a bit spicier and tangier however simply as creamy.

What was shocking was that this specific hen had arrived within the mail. Particularly, it got here in a microwaveable tray from CookUnity meal supply service that regarded somewhat like a white-label TV dinner—packed up earlier that morning in Seattle, then pushed all the way down to me in Portland, Oregon.

The world of ready meal supply is erupting in reputation as of late, and just about each main meal equipment service is getting in on the sport. I’ve nonetheless realized to mood my expectations when testing ready-to-eat meals. It is not simple to make pre-assembled meals style good, even when they had been good after they began. The issue is moisture. And the issue is the microwave. In lots of instances, the outcomes have been OK to subpar.

However to this point, CookUnity appears to be an enormous exception. CookUnity is a considerably new mannequin of ready meal supply service, one thing like a cross between a meal service and Doordash. Quite than make recipes in a top-down company kitchen, CookUnity is regional. The service enlists native and nationwide cooks, and guarantees to deliver restaurant-quality meals to the house—ready in response to recipes from sometimes fairly massive names. (Good day, Jose Garces.)

My hen lababdar particularly was a beautiful success. The saffron-tinged basmati rice maintained its moisture. My bits of thigh had been plump and nonetheless juicy. The sauce was calmly tangy, somewhat fiery, with most of its sweetness coming from the pure sugars of tomato and puree. Fairly frankly, it tasted so much higher than the hen dishes I may get from the (admittedly not nice) Punjabi restaurant down the road from my home. And but prep was only a matter of popping my tray within the toaster oven for 12 minutes, or within the microwave for 3.

Not each dish from CookUnity was pretty much as good because the lababdar from Seattle chef Gaurav Raj. Extra on that later. However in its ambition, its pool of culinary expertise, and its variety of dishes—Haitian! Indonesian! Filipino!—CookUnity is the most effective ready-to-eat meal supply service I’ve but examined or tasted.

This is the rundown, and the essential caveats.

How CookUnity Works

Courtesy of CookUnity

So first, the dangerous information: CookUnity is not accessible all over the place. The meal service is run out of eight regional commissary hubs round the USA and Canada: Seattle, LA, Austin, Chicago, New York, Atlanta, Miami, and Toronto. This leaves out West Virginia, and a good swath of the Plains states.