Frozen meals are the pinnacle of convenience – both at home and on the go. They’re perfect for taking to work or anywhere else you’ll have access to a microwave. They’re also perfect for making quick and easy meals at home if you’re super busy one day or just don’t feel like cooking!
The problem with frozen meals is that even if they have lots of protein and veggies, they often contain a ton of sodium and other undesirable ingredients and preservatives to keep them viable. While this is quite common in frozen meals, it isn’t always the case. It takes a little more time, effort, and research, but it is possible to create healthy, wholesome, and plant-based frozen meals.
This is good news for those who follow a strictly vegan and plant-based diet, but it’s also good for anyone who just wants to be a little healthier with their convenient choices. From heavy meals like rice and potatoes to lighter dishes filled with veggies, you’ll find a fantastic variety among these passionate, plant-based brands.
The Best Plant-Based Frozen Meal Brands
1. Daily Harvest Sweet Potato + Wild Rice Burrito Bowl
Daily Harvest is not only passionate about eating well and sourcing good ingredients, but they also want to make it as easy as possible for people to eat well and maintain a healthy diet. They do those through a variety of convenient and healthy products, including their collection of delicious frozen meals.
Among the more popular options is the Sweet Potato and Wild Rice Burrito Bowl. This meal is packed with amazing, powerful ingredients that work together to create a wonderful array of flavors as well. It’s reminiscent of a burrito bowl. Breakfast burritos are delicious, and this bowl version gives you a healthy dish with fewer unhealthy carbs. The key ingredients include tomatoes, avocados, sweet potatoes, wild rice, great Northern beans, and maitake – all organic. Other ingredients include a variety of additional veggies, spices, extracts, and more.
Even with so many ingredients packed in there, the whole dish only has 330 calories. It also offers nine grams of fiber, 11 grams of protein, and a variety of nutrients like calcium, potassium, iron, and more.
2. Healthy Choice Power Bowls
Healthy Choice Power Bowls has a small collection of vegan and plant-based frozen meals that focus on providing healthy, plant-based protein in the convenient, frozen format. Dishes include plant-based protein sources like tahini, quinoa, lentils, chickpeas, and more. They’re also packed to the brim with veggies, brown rice, whole grains, leafy greens, and so much more.
The Green Goddess power bowl is a popular example, offering 330 calories, 12 grams of fiber, an impressive 18 grams of protein, and plenty of calcium, potassium, iron, and vitamin C.
Other strictly plant-based and vegan frozen meals from Healthy Choice include Falafeland Tahini, the Buddha Bowl, and Cauliflower Curry. These will all have slightly varying nutrition facts and calories, but they all have one thing in common, they’re harnessing the power of plants!
If you’re looking to outfit your entire kitchen with healthier choices, the company also has things like dressings, soups, and wraps available for purchase, all of which are designed to help make your life better and easier!
3. Amy’s Frozen Bowls
Amy’s is a passionate, family-owned company that began in 1987 with a single wholesome pot pie made from scratch in the home of founders Andy and Rachel Berliner. They’ve been perfecting their methods and recipes for many years and today, Amy’s is quite successful.
In addition to providing healthy and plant-based options, they’ve always been committed to organic farming, even before it was officially a thing. When they began, there was no national certification for being organic, and truly organic food was hard to find. So, they partnered with small, local farms that were able to grow the organic ingredients they wanted.
Amy’s Frozen Bowls are amazing and they’re also just the beginning of what they have to offer. They have a large selection but their Brown Rice, Black-Eye Peas, and Veggies Bowl is the perfect example of what you can find. Tasty, tender veggies like broccoli and carrots sit on a bed of fluffy brown rice and delicious ginger sauce. In addition to being vegan it’s also gluten-free, kosher, and nut/tree nut-free.
In addition to their delicious, healthy frozen bowls they’ve also got soups, burritos, veggie burgers, pizzas, wraps, and much more, all made with the same commitment to quality ingredients.
4. Kashi’s Plant-Powered Bowls
Kashi has become fairly well-known for its line of healthy snacks, often available at most grocery stores these days. They’re mindful to use healthy and wholesome ingredients while balancing their customer’s needs and desires for easy, convenient foods that nourish them.
Their plant-powered bowls are an amazing example of how their line of food is evolving and offering more and more for their loyal customers to pick from.
Their selection of plant-based frozen meals includes sweet potato quinoa, chimichurri quinoa, Mayan harvest bake, and a creamy cashew noodle bowl. The sweet potato bowl is particularly popular as sweet potatoes continue to surge in popularity for their unique taste and lovely texture. This bowl contains 300 calories and offers nine grams of protein, seven grams of fiber, and 50 grams of carbs. Normally, such a high amount of carbs would turn many off, but the carbs you get from sweet potatoes are the much healthier kind, so you want lots of them!
5. Gardein Vegan Frozen Meals
Gardein is another company with a large selection of healthy, vegan, and plant-based options. Having such a wide selection makes the lives of their customers that much easier, by allowing them to cover more categories of their diet in the same place.
Their selection of vegan frozen meals is quite large, offering veggie-packed options with lots of rice to some of their plant-based meats thrown in there, such as sausages and chicken. The chicken fajita bowl is the perfect example of a great all-rounder with rice, “chicken,” and plenty of veggies. It contains only 250 calories and has 15 grams of protein along with lots of calcium, iron, and potassium.
If this combination isn’t to your taste, though, they’ve got plenty of others to choose from, allowing most customers to find something that fits their preference.
Meal-Planning Tips With Frozen Meals
Frozen meals have many purposes, from convenient work lunches to lazy weekend meals. However you choose to use your plant-based frozen meals, they’re great for planning ahead. If you have a big enough freezer, you can buy and plan ahead for a week or two at a time if you know what you want to eat ahead of time. Although it takes some effort, you can also supplement your planning (and ease up on the budget !) by adding some homemade frozen meals to the mix!
Making your own freezer meals may sound daunting, but it’s easier than it sounds, especially if you plan ahead. Follow these tips for the best possible experience:
Choose the Best Containers
This may seem inconsequential, but your life will be much easier if you choose the best containers. You want something stackable and freezer friendly, that are also easy for packing into lunches and are microwaveable.
Overlap Ingredients
If you’re making meals for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, prep time is much easier when you have some ingredients that work for all types of meals. Plant-based meat is a great example as there are breakfast, lunch, and dinner recipes featuring all different kinds of meals – most of which have an adequate plant-based alternative!
Versatile Ideas
Many things can be made into a nice freezer meal, but making the same very specific thing over and over again will eventually become old. Keep things simple and versatile, by doing things like soups, stews, chilis, and pasta like lasagna. These will always have the same basic method while being easy to mix up with different veggies, spices, textures, and other additives.
Label Everything
Labeling is another seemingly small thing, but it’ll make your life so much easier and faster, especially if you’re making a lot of frozen meals and plan very far ahead. You can even get special freezer-friendly labels that will last and keep looking nice and clear indefinitely.
Label each meal with information like what it is, what meal it’s for (breakfast, lunch, or dinner), and the day it was made. These basic facts will help you when packing lunch in the mornings, for example, and dating it helps you ensure no meals are forgotten, wasted, or allowed to go bad. If possible, labeling each container with thawing and cooking instructions will make things even easier and more seamless on a day-to-day basis!
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