There’s a new trend in meal kits, and I’m totally obsessed with them

Finding time to prepare dinner every evening can be stressful, but the cost of restaurant meals quickly outweighs the cost of preparing the food yourself. For anyone looking for a compromise that simplifies cooking throughout the week, Meal kits It may be exactly what you need. As a bonus, meal kits have never been better Compared to the cost of groceries.

Through my work testing these services at CNET, I’ve become fond of options like Blue apron, Marley spoon and Hello Fresh. With my upcoming cross-country move affecting my schedule and mental energy, I’ve gravitated toward a certain way of cooking. I’m not referring to choosing chicken over beef, I’m referring to plate dinners.

Here’s what makes it so attractive.

Paper plate meals are almost completely fool-proof

Lately, as I’ve been searching meal kit service sites, I’ve noticed more and more dish recipes popping up. These are meals that are cooked all at once in the oven on one or two trays and require little preparation.

In my experience, these types of meals reduce the overall cooking time. While the entire meal is baking (including the sides), I have time to clean up the little mess I made while preparing the meal, and even end up getting a little relaxation time. With sheet pan meals, I can still enjoy a home-cooked meal in a fraction of the time it would normally take to cook dinner. It’s a win-win situation in my book.

Some paper plate meals only take five minutes of active work

While some meals still require a little prep work, like chopping or dicing vegetables, others, like the ones mentioned above, require almost nothing. For the salmon dish, all I had to do was season the salmon with salt and pepper, rinse the produce and remove the ends of the green beans. The whole process took less than five minutes. Some recipes come with pre-cut vegetables to save even more time.

Sheet pan meals are often cooked in the oven, but I’ve recently been experimenting with baking a couple in the oven Wonder Pro OvenAnd they appeared as well. If you have a toaster oven large enough for your meal, you can certainly use it instead of a traditional wall oven if you prefer.

One-pot and one-pot meals are just as easy

You may also see some meals labeled as one-pan meals rather than one-pan meals, but there is only a slight difference between the two. Skillet meals are often cooked in the oven while one-pan (or one-pot) meals are cooked on the stove. However, both types essentially offer the same thing: an entire meal cooked in a single piece of cookware rather than several. You can think of these types of meals as a way to reduce the mess and reduce the stress of cooking—yet a homemade dinner.

Do all meal delivery services have cardboard meals?

It’s hard to say that definitively all The service offers paper meals, given the number available, but almost all the services we tested do so.

Includes some recent recipes we’ve seen Hoisin glazed pork and persimmon leaf from Blue apron, One shrimp cantinaFajitas from Hello Fresh and Low carb leaf cabbage parm from Marley spoon (our Top pick In 2026).

Aside from making weeknight dinners easier, my favorite thing about these types of recipes is that they are usually very easy to recreate, with or without the meal kit. For example, the salmon dish above has become part of my weekly dinner rotation even when the meal kit isn’t helping to feed me.

Another new trend worth mentioning…

You probably already know how useful this is It can be having an air fryerAnd it looks like meal kit companies are starting to catch on, too.

In many recipes, Blue Apron now offers alternative air fryer instructions for specific steps. So instead of turning on your oven to get a side of potatoes or vegetables, the service explains how to prepare them in the air fryer.

Although there are currently no recipes that are completely cooked in the air fryer like stir-fried meals, there are plenty of recipes that can help cut down on cooking time. We believe additional meal kit companies will soon cater to this trend as well.