Holiday Gifts for Your Favorite Foodie

Meal Delivery Service Subscriptions

Give a budding chef or a busy couple a smart shortcut to healthy meals. In our recent review of meal delivery service plans that bring preportioned recipe ingredients to your door, two especially stood out.

The meals we evaluated from HelloFresh ($69 for three meals per week for two people; $276 for one month; hellofresh.com) received very good taste scores. On average, the dishes were lower in calories, fat, and sodium than those from the other services we tested, and step-by-step photos made them easy to prepare.

With all organic ingredients, the recipes from Green Chef ($72 for three meals per week for two people; $288 for one month; greenchef.com) earned some of the best taste scores in our tests. We reviewed the company’s omnivore plan, but more selective eaters may prefer diet-specific options, such as carnivore, gluten-free, Paleo, and vegetarian.

Mail-Order Mixed Nuts

When you’re shelling out premium prices, you want these healthy gifts for foodies to look (and taste) as though you’ve done more than just grab it off the grocery store shelf. CR’s experts conducted a blind taste test of several mail-order mixed nut offerings. Some were disappointing—small sizes, broken pieces, even a rancid taste. But in the end, our tests revealed three options that looked and tasted special—and shipping is included in the prices.

Superior Quattro Gift Tray, $40/24 ounces
Large, whole, salted, fresh-tasting roasted nuts—almonds, cashews, pistachios—and macadamias, which made this assortment extra special.

Superior Trio Gift Tray, $25/20 ounces (shown)
Similar in quality to the Quattro, the Trio Gift Tray features the same selection of nuts, minus the macadamias.

Oh Nuts 4-Section Wooden Nut Gift Tray, $30/16 ounces
A winning combination of lightly salted almonds, cashews, pistachios, and mixed nuts.

More Holiday Gift Ideas for . . .

• The Gadget Geek

• The Home Entertainment Aficionado

• The Family Chef

• The Coffee Connoisseur

• The Social Animal

• The Globetrotter

• The Get Up and Go-Getter 

• When You Have the Urge to Splurge
   

Editor's Note: This article also appeared in the December 2016 issue of Consumer Reports magazine.

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