Best Healthy Food Meal Plan Delivery in Barcelona

If you’re an athlete or you take your diet and training seriously, you should take a look at the rising trend of healthy meal plan deliveries in Barcelona. It’s incredible how many options we have in this city, although I would say only a few of them are really high quality.

Here are the best healthy meal plan delivery options in Barcelona. I’ll keep updating this list as I discover more places. Please leave a comment with your favorites if you know of any more that fit the bill.

We have three categories of healthy food delivery services in Barcelona:

Fully Customized

This is something of a rarity in Barcelona, but it’s my favorite alternative to cooking myself. In fact, I don’t know of any place that offers this service via a web or mobile-based interface.

The chef who prepares my meals has become a close friend of mine and we are thinking of launching this service soon. So far, we’ve been running a test over the past year, and several of my friends are also buying food from him and have been very happy so far.

We are now at a stage where we can open it up a bit more, so if you’d like to try out the service, fill in the form below and I’ll get back to you with a plan that includes costs.

Calorie-based meal plans

These are purely focused on fitness enthusiasts and provide meal plans and specific nutrition information:

• Welthy
• The Fit Kitchen – great idea but dishes are too similar in taste to each other and heavily spiced. Will try again if they improve.
• The Muscle Cuisine
• Fitdietbox
• Menudiet
• SanaVida

Healthy food delivery

These are restaurants that consistently churn out high-quality food without being as strict as the previous ones:

• Calizumos – no information about the team
• Vegit – vegetarian
• Vegably – vegetarian
• Tres a la Cuina
• Coco Kitchen
• Heat & Fresh
• Poke Market
• Tiki Poke
• Poke Si
• The Fresh Poke
• Wetaca – not a big fan of their 1 delivery per week
• Foodinthebox – you need to cook it yourself
• Kraving Kanteens – only cater to companies
• Fish & Greens
• The Healthiest Choice
• BCN Hungry Mamas
• Vegan4u

If there are days when you feel like cooking at home, I highly recommend the FitMenCook app for its recipes and fantastic dishes. Video instructions also included, and it comes in English and Spanish.

Here are some similar services that operate in the US and Canada. We might be seeing more of them opening up in Europe in the future if their models prove to be successful.

• Genie
• Home Chef
• Sun Basket
• Freshly
• Blue Apron
• EveryPlate

Why We Don’t Cook Anymore

Before we had children, we used to cook at home a lot and also eat out very frequently. In Barcelona, you can find lots of great options for lunch since most restaurants have a menu del dia, which means a set menu for a fixed price that is usually excellent value for money.

Given that we both worked from home, it was a nice break from work to go out and have a nice lunch somewhere before getting back to work.

However, once we had children, our free time was much more constrained and we preferred to outsource our diets to the experts and thus eat healthier and better.

In 2020, the COVID crisis accelerated the trend of healthy food meal plan deliveries in Barcelona. Basically, many kitchens opened up, and they cook dishes and concentrate on selling them via delivery apps or by customers picking up their orders at the kitchen. This minimizes the costs of having tables and staff serving those tables, not to mention not being troubled by the COVID restrictions.

As a customer, I love the idea. It’s a trend that has been picking up steam in the United States as well. What we’re seeing is essentially the nascent era of cooking as a service. In much the same way as we have outsourced a lot of our daily chores to specialized services, cooking seems to be the next chore that is going to be outsourced in developed nations.

Cooking has traditionally been the role of the woman, and it takes up quite a lot of time to shop for the ingredients, cook and then clean up after. If you have a family with a few kids, it takes even more time. If you calculate it, it could easily take 4-5 hours a day once you factor in everything. Since more women are heading back to the workplace, it makes sense for them to outsource this chore.

In my opinion, leaving the cooking to a specialized chef will also most likely result in you eating a healthier and more varied diet. A kitchen with a good chef will be churning out many different dishes, while if you cook at home you will most likely eventually stick to a small variety of tried and tested dishes. Unfortunately, we are also living in a period in history where food has become very processed, and good raw materials are not easy to come by. A chef who buys raw material in bulk has the expertise of being able to distinguish between poor and great quality fish, poultry etc, and he can even buy it at a cheaper price due to his contacts and the amounts he is buying.

Even without calculating the monetary value of time spent on cooking, food is easily the biggest monthly expense for my family after rental payments. Since switching to purchasing most of our food from one of the kitchens, our costs have remained equal, but we have gained a lot of extra time and eat way better since we have a professional chef with years of experience cooking for us.

Here are some reasons for giving up cooking your own food:

• Gaining extra time
• Spending more time with your partner and kids
• Letting the pros do the work
• Better control your portions
• Protecting yourself from injuries (burns, cuts etc)
• Less cleaning up
• No grocery shopping

Another benefit for me specifically as I pursue athletic excellence for the various sports I practice is that I can have my dietician coordinate with my fitness coach and chef to make sure I am getting exactly the right fuel for my workouts and upcoming tournaments. If I had to do this myself I would definitely get it wrong and it would be too time-consuming.

Cooking at home on occasion is of course still a nice idea, especially when it involves all family members and serves as a relationship-building activity. It’s also great to go out for a nice meal at a restaurant every once in a while.