The 4 Best Whole Foods Prepared Meals to Heat and Eat

Tired: microwave dinners. Wired: dinners you microwave. Millennials and Gen Z may not be as into oldfangled TV dinners as their forebears, but a whole industry has sprung up to provide premade meals to busy people who want to toss something in the microwave and move on with their lives—think: Factor, Cook Unity, Purple Carrot, and the like. 

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Whole Foods is keeping up with the Joneses. They have a pretty big selection of pre-made, grab-and-go, prepared meals that are fresh rather than frozen, so you just nuke ‘em for a couple of minutes and they’re ready to eat. They look more appealing than the frozen TV dinners of yore and they’re a little pricier, too—but do they taste good? 

My colleague Justine Sterling and I sat down to seven of these Whole Foods prepared meals (we’d put TEN in our cart, but availability seems to change a lot from day to day) and tasted them back to back. Some of them are hard passes; others will suffice if you’re hungry and want something that replicates a hearty, homemade meal without any of the effort that goes into actually cooking a hearty, homemade meal. Here are four Whole Foods meals we recommend. 

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Whole Foods Meals!

Chicken Fajitas

Amazon

This Whole Foods meal doesn’t come with tortillas, so is it really “fajitas”? No, it’s a slop bowl. But I agree, fajita bowl sounds less appealing. Yeah, it’s a rice bowl and it’s fine. For $10 you could definitely go to Chipotle and get something better, but hey, maybe you live upstairs from a Whole Foods or you always pass one on your way home from the office. The chicken is meh and the whole thing smells zestier than it tastes, but you could fix this up with some sour cream and maybe some pico de gallo, and it will taste somewhat better than it does straight out of the microwave.

Credit: Liv Averett / Amazon

Rating:

7.5/10

Sporks

Whole Foods Meals!

Black Pepper Beef

Amazon

Okay, so the beef in this Whole Foods prepared meal is TOUGH. Luckily it’s cut into pretty small pieces, so you can just kind of swallow them whole. And before you stop reading, allow me to say that the sauce is nice! It actually has a little bit of black pepper burn. And there are plenty of peppers and onions in the mix, which also contribute a lot of flavor. The white rice is mush, but it has a congee kind of thing going on we were okay with. But please, if you have any sort of dental issues or you wear dentures, don’t buy this beef!

Credit: Liv Averett / Amazon

Rating:

7.5/10

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Whole Foods Meals!

Mushroom Stroganoff

Amazon

A nice thing I can say about this: It has a lot of mushrooms. Oh, and it smells good! Very mushroomy. And it is creamy, but it’s missing that sour creamy tang. It’s mushroomy but the flavor still falls kinda flat. The noodles are fat, but somehow they aren’t quite tender. This was the second best Whole Foods meal we tried and, I gotta be honest here, it’s…fine at best.

Credit: Liv Averett / Amazon

Rating:

7.5/10

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Whole Foods Meals!

Chicken Tikka Masala

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Here it is, the best of all the Whole Foods prepared meals we tried. The chicken is juicy. There’s plenty of masala sauce, although it doesn’t taste all that much like masala sauce. The rice has A LOT of cinnamon on it and there’s cinnamon in the garam masala, so this starts to taste pretty Christmassy pretty fast. In fact, the rice is so cinnamon-laced we kinda thought it tasted like rice pudding. It’s not going to become a stand-in for takeout from your favorite Indian restaurant, that’s for sure, but if you’re looking for a fast and flavorful meal, this is your guy.

Credit: Liv Averett / Amazon

Rating:

7.5/10

Sporks

Other Whole Foods meals we tried

Chicken Fettuccine Alfredo, Vegetable Lo Mein, Spaghetti and Meatballs