With lots of meal delivery services promising to help you on your weight loss journey available in Australia, I’m always looking for services that stand out.
Dietlicious have been around since 2010, with the sole aim of delivering flavourful frozen meals to people across Australia.
I’ve ordered myself a box to give their meals a proper test. Read on to see what I thought of their website, delivery, and meal experience.
Dietlicious Prepared Meals Review
Summary
Dietlicious offers a selection of low-calorie, frozen meals with an emphasis on healthy eating and convenience, perfect for those looking to maintain a balanced diet without the commitment of a subscription. The meals are tasty and filling, though some dishes lose their ideal texture after reheating.
Overall
-
Ordering - Website - 6/10
6/10
-
Food - Quality - 8.5/10
8.5/10
-
Ordering - Meal Choice - 8.5/10
8.5/10
-
Food - Taste - 8.5/10
8.5/10
-
Ordering - Delivery - 6/10
6/10
-
Value For Money - 6/10
6/10
Pros
- Incredibly convenient with no lock-in subscription.
- Multiple diet plans, including keto, fasting, and diabetic-friendly options
- Offers 55+ single-portion options, including a good range of vegetarian choices.
Cons
- Certain meals, especially with eggs, may lose texture after reheating.
- Charges for delivery and optional thermal liners add to the overall cost.
- Website can be difficult to understand and navigate.
It’s important to start this review by saying that Dietlicious is owned and operated by the same people who run Gourmet Dinner Service.
In fact, their menus have significant crossover and you’re able to order Gourmet Dinner Service meals from Dietlicious (and vice versa). After trying both services, I’m confident the meals are cooked in the same kitchen and the main differences are:
- Meal Size (Gourmet Dinner Service meals are higher calorie)
- Branding
Therefore, it’s fair to say that there’s a lot of crossover in my opinion on this review, with my opinion on my Gourmet Dinner Service review.
Page Contents
Getting Started with Dietlicious
Dietlicious are a frozen prepared meals provider, meaning that their meals are frozen immediately after cooking. They remain frozen throughout delivery and need to be kept in your freezer at home.
Unlike many other meal delivery services, Dietlicious offer one-off deliveries instead of a subscription service. That’s great because there’s no risk of being hit with unintended charges from a subscription you thought you’d cancelled. You can also order meals on a schedule suitable for you, rather than a fixed weekly/fortnightly delivery.
Meals are sold either through meal plans or individually so you can follow a recommended diet plan or choose your own preferred selection of meals.
There are quite a few different meal plans available, so let me share a sample of them to give you a good idea of what those look like:
- Food Cleanse
- 800 Calories
- 1200 Calories
- 1500 Calories
- Diabetic Diet
- Intermittent Fasting
There’s a helpful page on their website that explains each of the meal plans and who they’re suitable for.
Each meal plan offers 2-3 meals a day, often with an additional snack. They range from between 5-10 days in length, and there are multiple varieties of each plan that include different meals.
The different menu options are also often split between a meal plan that includes salad greens, and one where you’re recommended to add your own.
One incredibly helpful feature of Ditelicious plans is the ability to request meal swaps allowing you to switch out up to 3 meals in a menu for any other meal of the same value.
Meal Variety and Options
Dietlicious offers ~55 different single-portion meals, featuring a diverse range of cuisines and including dishes like soups and salads. For me, that represents plenty of variety and it would take a while before getting bored of repeating meals.
Here are a sample of the options available on Dietlicious’ menu:
- Korean BBQ’s chicken with sesame rice
- Kashmiri lamb curry with basmati rice
- Texan beef wrap
- Penne with bacon + kale matricana sauce
- Thai red salmon curry with sweet potato
Across the menu, I counted 18 chicken, 7 fish, 6 beef, 4 lamb, and 3 pork dishes. It’s not surprising that a diet-focussed meal service prioritises lean chicken as a good source of low-fat protein.
There are also 15 vegetarian options available. That’s a good range that makes Dietlicious quite suitable for vegetarians.
If you want to order multi-portion meals, you can select meals from Gourmet Dinner Service that serve anything from 2 to 8 people. These often have slightly bigger portion sizes and therefore might not meet your diet plan, but I think it’s a fantastic option to have as part of your order.
Considering the extensive menu, it’s quite surprising Dietlicious don’t offer a weekly or fortnightly subscription. Especially when dieting requires consistency over multiple weeks to see a major impact.
Nutritional information
The menu presents information for calories, protein, carbs, and fat for each meal. As Dietlicious is aimed (unsurpringly) at people on calorie deficits, it’s not surprising to see most meals contain between 300 – 400 calories.
Clicking into any meal also provides the saturated fats, sugars, sodium, and fibre values. Potential allergens are highlighted in the ingredients list.
I never had any issues with missing or incorrect nutritional details, unlike some alternative meal delivery services.
Special diets and food intolerances
Dietlicious offer meals (and meal plans) for a variety of special diets including:
- Keto
- Low Salt
- Vegetarian
- Diabetic
- Fasting
There’s also an option to filter meals for “softer foods” that are suitable for people with issue chewing and/or swallowing. I’ve never seen this option before, and I think it shows Dietlicious caring for as many people as possible.
There are only 7 vegan meals, so Dietlicious probably isn’t best suited for strict vegans. Instead, check out my favourite vegan meal delivery services.
If you have a strong allergen, Dietlicious wouldn’t be the right service for you. They aren’t able to promise the complete avoidance of cross-contamination for any common allergens. Here’s their full statement:
“Our kitchens also handle ingredients that contain allergens such as dairy, egg, wheat, barley, rye, oats, gluten, fish, crustaceans, molluscs, peanuts, tree nuts, other nuts, sesame, seeds, soy, sulphites and/or capsicum. Whilst we have strict hygiene and food handling standards that we adhere to, and we are externally audited for, customers must understand that eating our meals is at your own risk as our meals may contain traces of these allergen ingredients. Dietlicious and Gourmet Dinner Service cannot guarantee a total absence of any of these products in any of our meals.”
https://www.dietlicious.com.au/faq
Delivery Options
Dietlicious deliver meals to the following areas:
- Sydney Metro & Regional NSW
- Brisbane Metro & Regional QLD
- Melbourne Metro & Regional VIC
- ACT
That means anyone in WA, NT, or TAS are out of luck unfortunately.
Each postcode has their own set of weekly delivery days, which you can select when ordering. That means the most you’ll wait for your meals is up to a week.
Here in Sydney, Dietlicious can deliver on any weekday which is a great service.
Unfortunately, delivery does come at quite a significant cost. Regular delivery costs $16.50 and Express Delivery (order by 8:30am for same day) is a whopping $37.50.
There’s also an additional charge of $3.50 if you want to add a thermal liner and extra ice gel pack to your order, which is critical if your order might be sitting around for more than a couple of hours. This option is usually free with most alternative services.
If you’re in Brisbane (Meadowbrook) or Sydney (Brookvale), you could save some cash by picking up directly from their warehouse.
How much does Dietlicious Cost?
Dietlicious meals are all priced individually making it difficult to compare their pricing against competitors.
Meals are priced between $10.75 up to $16.50, with the average meal costing roughly $13.50.
There are no bulk volume discounts if you buy more meals.
In fact, I calculated the individual cost of each meal in the 800 calorie meal plan for a cost of $219.50. The actual meal plan costs $223. You’d be paying an extra $3.50 for a more restrictive menu.
Whilst I haven’t checked this for every meal plan, I’d advise checking the meal plans yourself and seeing if it’s cheaper just to order the meals individually.
It’s also worth noting that there’s a minimum order of $75. This is in line with most of their competitors and is the equivalent of 6-7 portions of food.
Featured Service
My Dietlicious Review Box
My Dietlicious box arrived early in the morning, dropped in the lobby of my apartment building. I had opted for the additional thermal liner + ice pack which kept the meals frozen until I picked the box up in the early afternoon.
I’d highly recommend paying the extra $3.50 if you think the box might be left for more than 2-3 hours, especially on a hot day.
The box itself isn’t branded in any way, except for a sticker on the top. Fortunately, the meals themselves were all branded Dietlicious and each label had clearly printed heating instructions and an ingredients list.
How’s The Food?
Overall, I was repeatedly surprised about how Dietlicious meals didn’t feel like traditional diet food.
The portions are definitely on the smaller side, and yet still managed to be quite filling. Most of the meals I tried genuinely tasted like reheating home-cooked food.
Ingredients like rice and vegetables retained a pleasant texture despite being microwaved, and I found that the meals consistently provided great flavours. I really enjoyed every meal I tried.
It’s important to give credit to their recipe design team. They’ve chosen ingredients that are perfect for being frozen and reheated, then cooked them in a way they’re the right texture after being blasted in a microwave.
Although I haven’t tried every Dietlicious meal on the menu, my experience gives me confidence that they’re going to be consistently enjoyable meals.
Meals I tried
The Malaysian Beef + Noodle Salad was probably my favourite meal despite a lack of clarity on the instructions. This needed defrosting in the fridge but I ended up using the microwave.
Thankfully, no harm done as the flavourful beef paired fantastically with the dressing, noodle, and salad to create an incredibly filling meal for under 400 calories.
The Vege Lasagne is a very difficult dish to get right, especially as Lasagne’s are often very calorific. Visually the lasagne slice looking small and unappealing, but it made up for those issue with a great flavour and texture.
I really enjoyed eating this lasagne, although to keep it healthy they only used a small amount of bechamel sauce (the best part!).
The Beef Ragu with Cauliflower Mash was a really enjoyable meal, with the ragu itself packing a lot of flavour and plenty of melt-in-the mouth beef.
The cauliflower mash was very ‘creamy’ bordering on watery, which was disappointing. I would have much preferred to have retained some texture of cauliflower.
The Breakfast Frittata ranked as the most disappointing meal. Despite an enjoyable flavour, these didn’t retain their texture after spending a few minutes in the microwave.
If you’ve ever reheated egg before it’s a texture you’ll be familiar with as it becomes quite rubbery. Add this to mushy pumpkin and the breakfast frittata delivered a strange overall mouth feel.
Reheating the prepared meals
Each meal had specific instructions to use the Defrost feature on your microwave for 5-10 minutes before placing it on full power for another 2-3 minutes.
I quickly learned that my microwave has a less powerful defrost feature, resulting in some meals not being fully reheated after the recommended time. This isn’t the fault of Dietlicious, but a warning to adjust your reheating times based on the performance of your microwave.
You could also take meals out of the freezer 24 hours before eating to defrost fully, but that does rather take away from the convenience.
My Overall Thoughts on Dietlicious
Having tried the Dietlicious experience, my overall impression is a positive one. As a service that provides ‘diet’ meals, I was consistently impressed with the flavour and sizing that felt more like a regular meal delivery service.
With the entire menu consisting of meals between 300-400 calories, you can’t go too far wrong just picking out your favourite dishes from the menu. The ability to buy a few multi-portion meals from Gourmet Delivery Service is a really handy add-on.
I’m always positive about services that don’t force you into a subscription, but this is one scenario where I think offering a subscription option would be really helpful so I wouldn’t have to think about organising my next meals every week.
Dietlicious does come with a few downsides though:
- Delivery costs are expensive, including charging for a thermal liner.
- The meal plans can be more expensive than buying each individual meal separately.
- There are no discounts for buying in bulk.
- Whilst every meal tastes good, some of them lose their texture after being frozen and reheated.
Those being said, I’m very happy to recommend Dietlicious to anyone who’s looking to be more consistent with their dieting and wants to eat healthy, nutritious, homecooked-style meals. They’re perfect for stocking up your fridge with 10 to 20 meals that you can pick out and reheat when you need.
With 55 different options on the menu, it might take you some time to try them all.
Alternatives to Dietlicious
The most similar service available currently would be Lite n Easy, who I’ve reviewed a few times whilst running Food Box Mate.
Lite n Easy dinners aren’t quite as tasty as Dietlicious, but they do come in quite a bit cheaper when buying in bulk. There’s a huge amount of variety and the website is incredibly easy to order from.
Check out more details on my Lite n Easy review.
I’d love to hear about other people’s experiences with Dietlicious – were they similar to mine? Did you find my Dietlicious review useful? Let me know in the comments section below!
