Today we follow up on our comparison of grocery deliveries throughout New York City. Grocery delivery services promise fresh, healthy foods with minimum effort and reasonable prices. Therefore, the most important comparison should be vegetables and salads (we know, fruits are important too, but not for today).
Maximizing Convenience and Price
It’s hard to do an apples to apples comparison – literally, on fresh produce. But young professionals rarely have the time for slicing, dicing, skinning, and peeling. Let’s focus on vegetable intake methods requiring under six minutes of preparation prior to eating!
Salad Kits – Winner Amazon Fresh
FreshDirect offers a Kale Caesar salad kit from Earthbound for $4.99, 8.5oz. Interestingly, they have no romaine lettuce kit, only a private label option for $5.99 and 8oz.
Amazon Fresh and Amazon Prime Now have tried and true Caesar salad kit for only $2.99, and it clocks in at 10oz. To be clear, all of these kits save you the labor of peeling your own romaine (or peeling from a head of iceberg). They also have pre-shredded cheese, a packet of Caesar salad dressing, and a packet of croutons.
Ditch the Kits?
For those who want to be even more healthy or economical, you easily downgrade to the $1.99 romaine lettuce salad bag, which does not come with the cheese, dressing, or croutons. Arguably, you should ditch those anyway, or at least use only half of what they give you! Let’s check the pricing on crafting your own salad.
If you really want to rough it and start from the lettuce head, you can buy a romaine head for $2.49 at FreshDirect. Amazon still takes the lead at $1.99.
Steamed Veggie Kits – Winner Amazon Fresh
The biggest problem with salads are the temperature. They are cold, almost by definition. Those who enjoy heated foods will need to bust out at least one heating appliance – preferably the microwave. Microwavable vegetable steaming packs have been around for at least a decade. Some companies claim to have special patented valves to optimize the moisture and steaming rates. They honestly all seem the same.
FreshDirect has their “Sides in a snap” bags. You can get 8oz broccoli florets for $4.99. Wow, $4.99?!? You can also get a medley of veggies for the same $4.99, this time with carrots and cauliflower. To be fair, these are non-frozen, fresh vegetables, pre-cut and ready for you to “heat and eat.” You can also get prepared and ready to steam items, such as the Asian Veggies with Ginger-Garlic sauce. Unfortunately, it seems to come with huge heaps of sauce (sodium and sugar), so I would avoid it. Add your own low sodium soy sauce or olive oil to your own tastes.
How about the world of frozen vegetables? Again, millennials sometimes have no choice. Frozen veggies means no pressure to finish everything within 3 days. You still get all the convenience of the microwave, only it takes 6 minutes instead of 4. And it’s MUCH more reasonably priced. A 10.8oz bag of Birds Eye Steamfresh vegetables is only $2.99 on FreshDirect. Unfortunately, Amazon Fresh trounces the competition, coming in 33% cheaper at $1.99 for the identical product!
The lightly seasoned Asian medley is no better – $2.99 vs. $1.97.
Clearly on vegetables fresh or frozen, salad or heated, from a price standpoint Amazon Fresh wins this round. But stay tuned as we move on to proteins and pantry essentials!
Editor’s Note: We updated this article to enhance readability.
