Review: Thistle

I will preface this review by saying that I love salads. I've been reviewing plant-based meal kits and vegan meal delivery services for the better part of this year, and I've learned that man (in this case, me) cannot live on reheated frozen foods alone. I ache for a fresh element—a crunch of a root vegetable, a ping of citrus. Enter Thistle: a gluten-free, single-serving vegan meal delivery service that focuses on fresh produce with varied cuisines using additive-free vegan ingredients.

Thistle offers breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks, and you can customize how many of each meal you want to be delivered per week, with two delivery days available. (You can change, pause, or cancel your subscription any time.) Meals are single servings, so this meal plan is best for those eating alone. Thistle's meal plans are only available in East and West Coast cities and Chicago right now (you can enter your ZIP code to see if your area is covered), and change depending on week and location, with certain jarred salads, soups, juices, and shots available every week. All of Thistle's standard meals are vegan, gluten- and additive-free, but there's an optional add-on for sustainable meats for certain dinners and lunches at an additional $3 per meal.

Meals mostly follow the same formula: preprepared with no cooking required. Those that do require prep just need a quick flash in a pan to get the flavors juicin' together. Breakfasts were simple: a gluten-free pastry or oatmeal with a fresh fruit element; once a stand-out granola-smoothie bowl. The salads were my favorite—they focused on various textures to really make the individual ingredients pop, and always had tasty, bright dressings. Thistle’s more hearty dinner choices, like the chimichurri pasta bowl, only needed to be sautéed in a pan for a few minutes, but were better the next day when all the flavors had set together.

Tasty Meals—for Most

Thistle has a new, curated menu each week, but you can always make edits to suit your taste. Because I wanted to be a completely unbiased tester, I went with Thistle’s premade menu, which was mostly a mix of gluten-free, fruit-focused breakfasts; inventive, fresh salads; and mostly preprepared bean- and pasta-forward veggie dinners. You can select your preferences during signup, but Thistle accommodates soy, tree nut, coconut, peanut, fish, shellfish, and pork allergies.

As previously mentioned, Thistle is great for those with dietary restrictions—all meals already don’t contain dairy, eggs, gluten, refined white sugars, artificial sweeteners, artificial preservatives, additives, or dyes. See? It’s a “crunchy” choice, while still being tasty enough that the average health-oriented person—vegan or not—will most likely find something they like. That is, emphasis on average: My Hamburger Helper-eating Missouri born-and-bred uncle may not have the same raves about these meals as I do.

Like most meal delivery kits and subscription services, especially those with special dietary requirements or anything slapped with a vegan label, the meal packages are pretty pricey. The meals in this kit are more than I ever spend on weekly groceries: breakfasts start at $13, with lunches and dinners at $16, but they go down in price as you order more meals. All snacks are $7.50. At the time of writing, Thistle is offering 40 percent off first orders, which made my order of three breakfasts, lunches, and dinners (with no snacks) go from $122 to $73, which is a pretty solid deal at around $8 per meal.

Ready, Set, Eat

Unlike a true meal kit, Thistle doesn’t come with ingredients and meal cards. Once the meals arrive, all you need to do is find space in the fridge—or grab a fork and pop open the container. The meals are delivered in a reusable, insulated bag with recyclable ice packs that you set out with each new delivery to reuse in future orders and cut down on waste. Each meal is already prepared in a simple plastic container, with nutrition facts and ingredients on the label. Many of the meals could be eaten chilled (as is) straight from the fridge, but if you opt to reheat, the directions were simply to heat “in a skillet for 2-3 minutes or until desired temperature.” In this regard, Thistle would be perfect for people who want to eat raw and plant-based but don’t want to do any of the work.

The meals are pretty nutritionally balanced. Lunches and dinners are generally 400 to 550 calories, with 20 grams of protein or more and around 15 grams of fiber. Breakfasts are more like snacks and are 250 to 400 calories, with at least 10 grams of plant-based protein and around 10 grams of fiber. All of the lunch and dinner meals were surprisingly filling for being so vegetable-focused.

My favorite meals focused on multiple textures and various ingredients to make a truly dynamic salad-type dish. The Corn and Poblano Chile Salad With Adobo Pinto Beans was a solid, Mexican-inspired meal that was the perfect lunch to eat on the first warm spring day of the year. Roasted poblano peppers, sweet corn, cabbage, brown rice, and pinto beans worked well together with the mild spinach backdrop and a roasted jalapeno vegan ranch dressing that I could’ve drank straight from the ramekin.

I still dream of the Lemongrass Shirataki Bowl, a cold noodle salad dish that hit all the right elements of savory-spice and varied texture. The chilled rice noodles came with a lightly spicy marinated mince of sautéed vegetables and pea protein crumbles. The crisp cucumber, spinach, ginger, lemongrass, and peanuts added a crunchy texture, but the yummy salty, slightly tangy housemade vegan “fish” sauce truly brought this all together. This sauce used dynamic ingredients like coconut aminos, date syrup, rice vinegar, lime juice, tahini, mushrooms, and seaweed to get that same great super-umami flavor of fish sauce but without the suffering. Sigh, I wish I could eat it again.

I’m not a breakfast person, so Thistle's small, fruit-forward choices were perfect for me. A dense, dry polenta almond cake was saved by a bright, sweet raspberry chia jam. A smoothie bowl with blackberry and hibiscus topped with crunchy coconut granola was the perfect start to my day. The Super Seed & Berry Muesli overnight oat dish had good texture variety, and its bright-blue coconut and vanilla spirulina “mylk” was a fun addition, although I wish it had a little more fruit to add a fresh element.

The heated dinner meals were good but didn’t feel as complex as the hearty salads. A chimichurri sauce was the stand-out on an otherwise one-note pasta dish with beans, artichoke, spinach, and sun-dried tomatoes. A Latin-inspired black bean, spinach, rice, and plantain dish needed more acid or spice to liven it up. Other snacks, like a charcuterie-type plate, fell a little flat with veggies that were beginning to dry out and a funky vegan cheese with a grainy texture. (Later that night though, I had Thistle’s vegan take on cheesecake with a tahini tres leches mousse that was perhaps the best vegan dessert I’ve ever had, so all was—pretty much—forgiven.)

Nothing Is Perfect

Besides the high price point—except for right now with 40 percent off (seriously, if you’ve been curious about this meal kit, I’d recommend you try while it's heavily discounted)—I don’t have many gripes with Thistle.

When you sign up for a plan, you receive texts with updates on your delivery and they notify you when the delivery has been dropped off. I got the text notification that it was dropped off Sunday night, but when I checked nothing was delivered. The next day, I found out the delivery person ended up dropping it off at my neighbor’s instead. I had to wait a whole week, until the next Sunday, to get another delivery. It was a bummer because I had to last-minute grocery shop for the week ahead on a busy Sunday night, which I hadn’t budgeted for—time- or moneywise. In the future, I may opt to meet the delivery person face-to-face so I can guarantee I’ll be fed that week.

All of the meals come in plastic containers, which can be very tricky with recycling. If you opt for this service, I’d make sure to check your local guidelines for which plastics are accepted and recycled. Where I live, they are much more lax with plastic recycling requirements, so I rinsed all of my containers and said a prayer to Mother Gaia that they would be recycled and not end up in a landfill for the rest of time. Most of the jars with twist lids were solid enough that they could be washed and reused.

I loved these tasty, low-to-no-prep healthy vegan meals, but I don’t know if I could only eat them for weeks on end. I’m a natural-born cook. I would miss the ritual of chopping, adding spices, and sautéeing. But I most likely will be supplementing my regular meals with some of these dynamic, hearty salads for a quick, healthy lunch.