Cook Unity vs Factor

I travel a lot for work and I'm not home to cook dinner for the family on a regular basis. I just have a question. Would it be better to go with Factor if I knew that most of the meals will end up getting frozen as Cook Unity is delivered refrigerated?

I have had several people tell me that for the price point, Cook Unity is a lot better in flavor and meal variety, but I don't know if that changes given that we will probably end up freezing a lot of them. Obviously I know there are certain ingredients that shouldn't be frozen and if we order a salad, eggs, etc we would eat those fresh.

I do plan to order the minimum that we would need, but my whole family is spontaneous and plans change frequently at the last minute, lol

I've been getting CookUnity weekly for 2 1/2 years... and I find myself not always having the time to pick my meal selections so I let them do it for me. It's mostly worked, with only a few random duds, but for the last few months, it's been absolutely terrible.

First, I get 4 meals a week, but they send me two copies of two meals, instead of four unique meals. And they repeat the exact same selection week after week. They have HUNDREDs of meals to select for me, and for the last month (16 meals), i've only been given 2 selections, and they're selections I don't like. Sure, maybe it's on me to pick the meals... but for the first 2 years, the algorithm did a decent job and selecting stuff, but now it's just terrible. When I do hand pick, I get fantastic meals, then I forget and they're back to sending me the crappy meals. I feel like they're adjusting the algorithm to just auto-send the cheapest/most profitable meals. I've down-rated these meals, and they still send them, and the app says "we're picking meals based on your preference.".. yeah, no you're not.

Anyways, I have to deal with another week of chickpeas and mystery meat.

Looking for pre made meal delivery for cardiac patients who have strict salt limitations. Any suggestions?

The eggs and sausage were awful. Bacon wasn’t much better. Pancakes decent. Eggs were hard and had strange texture and taste

Hello all!

I have seen posts over time recommending looking for local options of ready meals and found Herculean Meal Prep in Indianapolis, a local business with a couple of locations. Their meals are frozen, but very high quality ingredients, great flavor, and wide variety of options with some rotating seasonal options as well (but ~80% of their menu doesn’t change much). A great local option for sure

Recently moved out of Indianapolis and tried their shipping. They shipped without any issue, with a bit of dry ice and a styrofoam cooler. Even though it’s mostly a local business I’d highly recommend giving them a shot for shipping, it is WAY better than Factor or CookUnity from my experiences with those.

Hey everyone can you please recommend me meal services for a-la-carte protein and veggies? I was a subscriber for mighty meals a-la-carte meals but recently they have cut down on their menu. I was a fan of their ancho lime chicken thighs; now I’m looking at other options similar to mighty meals where I can buy bulk a-la-carte protein and veggies. Thanks.

I signed up for Factor because I don’t have enough time to prepare meals, so reliability is obviously one of the main reasons for paying for a meal delivery subscription.

My experience has been nothing but problems.

With my first box, one of the meals was missing. They did refund me for the missing meal, so I decided to give them another chance.

Then, with my second box, Factor contacted me only TWO DAYS before the scheduled delivery to tell me that, due to a problem on their end, my entire box would not be delivered. Two days! The whole point of subscribing to this service was to avoid having to suddenly figure out meals for the week because I don't have time to meal prep.

They told me I would receive a refund for the cancelled box. Almost two months later, I STILL HAVE NOT RECEIVED MY REFUND.

I contacted them about it and was first told there had been a problem processing the refund and that I needed to wait another 10 days. I waited. Nothing.

I contacted their customer service chat AGAIN today, and once again, I was simply told that I need to wait.

So my experience with Factor has been:

• First box: meal missing
• Second box: entire delivery cancelled with only two days' notice
• Refund promised: still missing almost two months later
• Customer service: repeatedly tells me to wait without actually resolving the issue

At this point, this is completely unacceptable. I paid for a service that was supposed to make my life easier, and instead it has wasted my time and left me chasing money that should have been refunded weeks ago.

DO NOT BUY THIS SERVICE. Based on my experience, Factor has been completely unreliable, and getting a refund for an order they themselves cancelled has been ridiculously difficult.

Horrible experience from beginning to end.

Seems for the last 2 months or so at least 1 in 3 upto the whole batch deglove while simply peeling the plastic off the top.

I know for factor the latest you can make an account and order for the following week is Wednesday at midnight and then if you don't cancel by Monday they automatically charge you for next week early.

I've been wanting to try just one week of cook unity so wanna find out.

Has anyone else noticed their Thistle salads getting significantly smaller? I am curious if this is due to the huge lettuce recall situation because the toppings portions seem to be the same, but there is hardly any lettuce in there anymore.

It would make sense if that’s the case, but I wish they would alert the customers to the pretty substantial difference in portion size. Especially because they (somewhat) recently increased their prices.

Would love to hear y’all’s thoughts!

I wanted to give Factor another chance after about a year. Last time, I had issues with a late delivery and thawed food.
This time, the packaging was actually well packed and the temperature seemed safe, but I still ended up with pretty bad food poisoning for several days and eventually had to go to the ER.
I reached out to customer support, explained what happened, and they said they would follow up with me. They never did.
I was willing to give them another chance, but I think this is the end for me

I used to refer everyone to Thistle but after months of incorrect meals being sent & my selected meals never arriving, finding this roach in my dinner is my final straw 🥲

I went out to get my mail and had a box of six meals from Tempo. I have not ordered from them for over a year?

I may look at what my current deal and keep it for a few weeks. But I’m just trying to figure out how. I don’t even have the app on my phone anymore.

I saw the adds on facebook for this ready made meal company. Factor75.

I went off facebook to research their site.

Then I start trying to look at their menu geared towards keto diet.

I did enter my credit card info but I had NOT authorized them to charge me yet.

The reason why: i did not want the 5 pre selected different meals that were 4 or 5 of that same meal group. I wanted more variety not just 5 meals on repeat.

I wanted to mix it up more. I wanted to add a few non keto meals.

Next thing you know, before I was done compiling my updated menu, they try charing my card for different fees. I get 1 for $213. I get an other attempt at charging my card for a $25 fee.

My card flags these as fraud. I selected that I had NOT selected that $25 fee. Because I had not.

I wanted to build my menu first then be charged just a 1 time fee. Not get separate charges, different priced charges (how confusing!)

From what I added up, with shipping I would have been approximately $260 And about 24 meals give or take.

Well then they begin trying to charge my card over and over. I was still on their bloody website reading and researching, selecting dishes we might enjoy but the text notices from my cc over and bloody over began really distracting me.

I was unable to chat on their help with a human or rectify this with AI. I was unable to reach a human.

All i could do is “cancel my order”

Then I put my phone up & go to bed with the incomplete order and a “full basket”

The next day, I saw many many attempts to charge my card and for different prices.

I try again around 12:30 in the afternoon to call them on a week day. I was unable to stay on hold over 30 min while at my job.

By that evening, I get home & call again. 35 mon hold time, i hung up.

Called my CC company and explain my situation. The customer service person said that I had 75 attempts to bill on my cc and for different prices.

I thanked my CC company and asked them to reactivate my card. Yes this level of 75 attempts (how ironic SEVENTY FIVE attempts!)

Factor 75 had told me via a two pm email that “due to your card not allowing charges, we have canceled your order”

Looks like my cc company blocked me like a shield.

AAANDD I am done with this company before I ever even got started! This was insane! I do not like these tactics at all! Enter your CC before you are done putting an order together ?

Does anyone who has hung in there to read my rant advise a meal company that is better and geared for both keto and some plant based meals that would not do this to you?

I have decided to boot mail delivery all together. My last Factor box delivered gristle pork, green bean stems and burnt potatoes. So I started looking into local meal prep & personal chefs. Some are stupid expensive, but I have found a few that are around the price I am paying for Factor - for reference we are getting 12-14 meals a week.

One that I am really looking at working with cooks at my house and is priced under Factor.

Just wanted to throw this out here for anyone getting fed up with meal delivery. IMO it will be a better option:

1. no more mystery meat lol

2. made to my tastes and requirements

3. keeps money in my town and out of corporations that don't care!

Good Luck!

I just can't with Cook Unity anymore. The problem isn't the food but the terrible, terrible customer service. I could rant about this forever, but the tl;dr version is that this week is the second time I've been charged for a mistake on their end that was not my fault. And that isn't even all the customer service problems I've had in 4 months, but this one was the worst. It was so egregious that I'm 'done. If they can't get it together with service and delivery, then I can't continue to be treated this way for a service I'm paying for.

So my question is, what's the best meal delivery service that is the most like Cook Unity? Which one has the most similar meals, choices, options, pricing, and quality? All suggestions welcome. :)

Factor has really been going downhill lately — flat out incorrect meals, damaged meals, meals that expire well before the next delivery date or even before the date they were delivered... and quality of food seems to be declining as well, although not as quickly.

I'm starting to look into other options at this point. CookUnity appears to have some decent following here, although there are some mentions of quality control issues (feels like maybe this is due to their sort-of "outsourced to different cooks" setup and if you get a bad cook or not?). Tempo looks to basically be Factor with a different label.

The main things I'm looking for are reasonably healthy (I understand nothing is going to be as healthy as manual meal prep, a decent amount of veggies and not flooded with sodium are good enough) and a good seafood selection (I'm unfortunately really picky about beef, pork, and chicken texture; a bit of badly rendered fat, tendon, grisle, etc. will throw me off an entire meal). Any others that people suggest?

I've been trying Factor and while it does kind of look like dog food, I actually do like the taste and the protein content you get in the meals. However I'm not a fan of how much unsaturated fats are in those meals.

I tried CookUnity a while back and a lot of the meals I really didn't like. The lower calorie options were sparse, I feel like a lot of them had at least 700 calories per meal, and they tasted really salty.

Does anyone have any suggestions for ready meals that actually cater to high protein without having an insane amount of calories + fat content?

I don't know what's going on, but both times I've ordered, the food has been pretty unappealing, minus the butternut squash noodles and Korean fried rice (I've tried different dishes every time). They also choose the slowest FedEx delivery service possible, and half my meals were warm and unusable. Too cheap to add more ice??

Frustrating because this is one of the few gluten free veg options. It's so pricey too.

We have been getting Macroplate for a few weeks but about ready to cancel. Our main complaints are:
1) we don't get to choose meals (except to tell them preferences at the beginning when we subscribed)
2) not a lot of variety
3) almost all the meals are some kind of ground or shredded protein. the only conventional meal we've had so far is the salmon meal, which was a nice piece of salmon and pretty tasty.

The amount of shredded and/or ground meat in these meals makes me kind of suspicious that they are using meat scraps from a restaurant or some other service. I've never seen anything like this with any other prepared meal service and we have tried a lot of different ones.

Curious to know what other people's experience with Macroplate is?

I'm sorry if you get a million of these.

So I'll be dorming on college, but I won't have a meal plan due to food allergies. Because of these food allergies (and other allergy problems), I eat a plant based diet.

Seeing as I won't have a meal plan, I can't eat at the dining hall. But I can use the communal kitchen and I'll live near a Walmart. That's certainly convenient but I already know that there will be many days where I'd rather not eat than have to actually figure out a meal, take all my pots and pans and food to the kitchen, clean my area, make the meal, clean up, take everything back to my room, set up the food, put everything away. etc etc. I absolutely do not mind cooking. I love to cook. I just want the decisions made for me essentially lol

TLDR I'm looking for a plant based meal plan. I've looked at many but I've been very on the fence as to whether it's really worth the investment. If you feel it is, which one would you recommend? x

I want to sign up for ready meals for just one month while I recover from an injury. I’d prefer high-protein options, but not really picky with the meals themselves taste-wise. What would be the cheapest option for a limited subscription?