Review (2025): CookUnity Prepared Meals

It shouldn't be surprising if a plate of chicken lababdar tastes delicious. The dish is among my favorite North Indian gravies, a slightly edgier cousin of butter chicken that's a bit spicier and tangier but just as creamy.

What was surprising was that this particular chicken had arrived in the mail. Specifically, it came in a microwaveable tray from CookUnity meal delivery service that looked a little like a white-label TV dinner—packed up earlier that morning in Seattle, then driven down to me in Portland, Oregon.

The world of prepared meal delivery is erupting in popularity as of late, and pretty much every major meal kit service is getting in on the game. I have nonetheless learned to temper my expectations when testing ready-to-eat meals. It's not easy to make pre-assembled meals taste good, even if they were good when they started. The problem is moisture. And the problem is the microwave. In many cases, the results have been OK to subpar.

Photograph: Matthew Korfhage

But so far, CookUnity looks to be a big exception. CookUnity is a somewhat new model of prepared meal delivery service, something like a cross between a meal service and Doordash. Rather than make recipes in a top-down corporate kitchen, CookUnity is regional. The service enlists local and national chefs, and promises to bring restaurant-quality meals to the home—prepared according to recipes from occasionally quite big names. (Hello, Jose Garces.)

My chicken lababdar in particular was a lovely success. The saffron-tinged basmati rice maintained its moisture. My bits of thigh were plump and still juicy. The sauce was lightly tangy, a little fiery, with most of its sweetness coming from the natural sugars of tomato and puree. Quite frankly, it tasted a lot better than the chicken dishes I could get from the (admittedly not great) Punjabi restaurant down the street from my house. And yet prep was just a matter of popping my tray in the toaster oven for 12 minutes, or in the microwave for three.

Not every dish from CookUnity was as good as the lababdar from Seattle chef Gaurav Raj. More on that later. But in its ambition, its pool of culinary talent, and its diversity of dishes—Haitian! Indonesian! Filipino!—CookUnity is the best ready-to-eat meal delivery service I've yet tested or tasted.

Here's the rundown, and the important caveats.

How CookUnity Works

Courtesy of CookUnity

So first, the bad news: CookUnity isn't available everywhere. The meal service is run out of eight regional commissary hubs around the United States 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.

But otherwise, if your zip code is covered, it goes like this: You sign up for a certain number of single-serve meals per week, which arrive in heatable trays in a big, cold-packed box. A representative menu for each region is available here, but you won't see any given week's menu where you live till you've entered your zip code and handed out your email address. (I know, I don't love this either.)

Like any prepared meal service, CookUnity saves you a lot of effort. And while it costs less than a restaurant delivery, each meal generally costs more than it would take to buy the ingredients for batched meals at a store. (Though with far-flung dishes, this math can get complicated in a hurry: Largely because of spices and sauces, meal-kit meals can often be hard to replicate in a home kitchen without spending a lot of money.)

Photograph: Matthew Korfhage

Discounts on your first week of orders from CookUnity are substantial, often as much as 60 percent off. But after you settle in, expect these single-serving meals to cost from $11 to $14 apiece depending on how many you order, plus maybe $15 per weekly box in service and delivery fees. Those who want to lock in a monthly subscription can avoid shipping costs and get discounts on some meals by paying $24 a month. Over the course of a month, this would lower your costs significantly—but also your flexibility when pausing or canceling delivery, which is otherwise pretty seamless.

What won me over with CookUnity is the quality of the meals—and the delivery service's unique structure that puts individual chefs to the forefront.

Each meal has two heating options: a “fast,” usually microwaved option, or a “chef-recommended” option whose preparation still isn't ever very complicated. Usually this means a toaster oven, or a pot for soup.

Unlike many prepared meal kits or ready-to-eat dinners, the meals tend to be substantial: 650 to 1,000 calories, meaning a single serving is usually a full and filling meal. And while the dishes are hardly health food, they're also not the fat and salt bombs that often plague the format.

A Regional Meal Delivery Model

Photograph: Matthew Korfhage

CookUnity calls itself a “chef collective.” In practice, this means it enlists restaurant chefs, including an interesting preponderance of Iron Chef alumni, to design recipes and run teams of cooks in any of the eight regional commissary kitchens.

Ingredients are sourced for the chefs by CookUnity in a shared kitchen. CookUnity handles the delivery. It also handles the packaging technology, which, through the magic of modified atmosphere packaging, can be stored at fridge temps for four to seven days.

But this said, each chef runs their own team of cooks within the commissary kitchen, just as if it were a restaurant. The net effect is that you find yourself ordering from individual chef operators, not quite from CookUnity itself—and the selection of chefs and dishes will be quite different from city to city and region to region. Some chefs might have operations in multiple cities. Some chefs will be quite local. It's a smart system, when it works.

And so that chicken lababdar from Seattle was indeed packed and sent out the same day to Portland. It arrived the same day and was about as good as a delivery meal from DoorDash, but at a lower cost. Among other standout dishes, the Seattle kitchen run by Austin Haitian-Creole chef Nahika Hillery served up a sweet-sauced barbecue chicken herbed up with Haitian epis, alongside a fun, lightly spicy, beet-accented potato salad dotted with peas—a side that somehow felt Russian, African, and French all at once.

Photograph: Matthew Korfhage

Other high points included a shrimp-topped udon soup from celebuchef Esther Choi, a shrimp and nopales plate from Seattle chef Santos Jiménez, and a well-designed walnut-feta-mint-farro-chicken salad from Los Angeles’ Dustin Taylor.

There were a couple misses, of course, including a lackluster lemon caper chicken fettuccine bearing the name of a Michelin-recognized chef, Kevin Meehan, out of Los Angeles. The sauce had clearly separated, leading to oily results. I also didn't get along with a somewhat dull green curry tray from Los Angeles Filipina chef Stacy Bareng—mostly a twiggy profusion of bamboo shoot and bell pepper—but I enjoyed the fun Filipino-Mexican fusion of her pork adobo tacos.

But the thing is, just like DoorDash, you get to choose which chefs you order from and which ones you don't choose again. And so if I stuck with the Seattle hub, I'd be hanging a lot with the good gravies from Chef Raj. But note that Seattle is one of the smallest hubs with just 13 chefs. People in the Northeast get to choose among more like 50 chefs.

Price and Caveats

Photograph: Matthew Korfhage

But CookUnity's regional strengths can also be regional weaknesses.

I had a terrific experience getting my meals from Seattle, about a three-hour drive away from my home. The ice pack stayed cold and the meals stayed in the safe temperature range. But I've seen other reports online from people in warmer regions, or who might live farther from their commissary kitchen.

But also, my experience with a given recipe in Seattle may not be yours at a different hub—even with the same chef's name and face on your meal box. Some chefs operate four or five kitchens at different hubs. Different kitchens may have different results, even with the same recipes. I can only speak to my own good experience, and the good experience of my colleague Louryn Strampe, who ordered out of the Chicago hub. The quality of the meals she got straight up blew her mind, Strampe wrote—and she's not always as kind to prepared meals.

Other quibbles? Maybe there are too few veggies in some dishes, perhaps because diners are more likely to complain when you skimp on the meat. Most meals are filled out in their calorie counts with starches like rice or noodles, an old saw well known to any and all restaurant chefs. That said, I'd rather they do this than leave me hungry. The meals remain substantial.

Mostly, I like the business model. Each chef making prepared meals is, essentially, a competing food business within the same big commissary kitchen. Their name is on each box, and a good number of the chefs have restaurants and reputations to protect. There are many incentives to make each meal interesting, and delicious. The results bear this out.