If you’re already living on a plant-based diet, or are considering a move towards veganism, you’ll know that finding new meals to replace traditional meat-based recipes can be challenging.
Then you have the constant challenge of finding organic, fresh, sustainable, and healthy ingredients.
Having a prepared-meal service ready to deliver ready-made vegan meals without the hassle could solve a lot of these headaches. It’s what Garden of Vegan promises.
This review of Garden of Vegan covers the full experience from our trial box. I hope you find it useful.
Garden of Vegan Prepared Meals Review
Garden of Vegan Review Summary
100% organic, plant-based prepared meals of the highest quality. With exceptional flavour and texture profiles, you’ll quickly forget these meals are vegan. However, your bank balance might not forget so quickly.
Overall
-
Ordering - Website - 10/10
10/10
-
Food - Quality - 10/10
10/10
-
Ordering - Meal Choice - 5/10
5/10
-
Food - Taste - 9/10
9/10
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Ordering - Delivery - 8/10
8/10
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Value For Money - 7/10
7/10
Pros
- Fully organic, gluten-free, and oil-free meals.
- Easy to order, manage, or cancel your subscription.
- Thoroughly enjoyable meals with exceptional flavour.
Cons
- Only 18 meal options available.
- Premium pricing adds up quickly.
Get $100 Off Across Your First 4 BoxesDiscover Garden of Vegan's 100% organic range today.
Garden of Vegan label themselves as Australia’s first and only provider of ready-made meals made from 100% certified organic ingredients, completely oil-free, vegan and gluten-free. The company was founded on the Gold Coast in 2018 by a group of five friends who spotted an opportunity to share their own dietary journeys towards a plant-based diet.
The philosophy is to provide meals ‘as close to nature as possible’. It’s a thread that runs through all their meals, with no refined sugar, no gluten and no unfiltered water used in the cooking process.
Getting Started with Garden of Vegan
Ordering with Garden of Vegan revolves around selecting your own full menu of meals or starting from a plan specifically designed to achieve your goals.
Selecting your meals is an easy affair, with options split up into categories:
- Essentials
- Comfort
- Gourmet
- Low Calorie
- Breakfast
Plus, you can add sides, snacks, or desserts at any point.
Most meals are available in multiple sizes allowing you to choose between 300g, 450g, and 600g.
300g would be the standard portion size, then 450g portions are suitable for anyone looking to build muscle mass or improve recovery times. With 600g portions ranging from 500 to 1200 calories, these would be more suited towards feeding 2 people.
Offering multi-portion meals is a huge selling point for couples who are supporting each other to eat healthier, plant-based meals.
Meal Plans
If you’re looking for a more guided introduction to Vegan meals, the meal plans provide a recommended 5- or 7-day programme aligned with your health goals. The plans available are:
- Cleanse and Detox
- Weight Loss
- Back to Health
- Increase Muscle Mass
- Improve Performance
- Shred and Sculpt
Depending on your plan, Garden of Vegan will supply meals covering breakfast, lunch, dinner and a side for every day of the week.
Each meal plan also comes with a juicing box, fruit box and nuts/seeds to keep you going through the week.
Having your meals prepped and ready to eat for the entire week makes sticking to your daily calorie intake significantly easier. If you often struggle to hit your dietary goals, these plans could be a real game changer.
Meal Variety and Options
As of the time of writing this Garden of Vegan review, there are 18 meal options plus an additional 6 sides available.
In comparison to other prepared meal services who often have 30+ options, this is a very limited variety. There’s no way to avoid repeating meals each week, which might be a major issue for you. Personally, I’m quite happy eating the same meals as long as they’re enjoyable (spoiler: they are!).
Examples of some of the meals include:
- Ginger and Sesame Noodle Salad
- Teriyaki Tofu Stirfry
- Mac and Cheese
- Enchilada Pie
- Japanese Nourish Bowl
- Mung Bean Dahl
Within the menu, there’s a good range of different protein sources. One of the biggest challenges for vegan meal delivery services is to avoid relying solely on tofu. For Garden of Vegan, this means packing meals full of vegetables and pulses to build a menu that delivers up to 30g of protein in a single meal.
The Garden of Vegan pantry is packed full of useful snacks and ingredients including seed mixes, coconut flakes, dried fruits, lentils, oats, and more. These are a great way to stock up on high-quality store cupboard ingredients as part of your weekly delivery.
Lastly, you can order one of the assorted boxes of fresh organic produce. These are:
- Veggie Box
- Juicing Box
- Fruit Box
The veggie and fruit boxes come in either ‘Standard’ or ‘Deluxe’ options. As I haven’t tried these as part of my orders, I couldn’t tell you what the difference is. My best (and most logical) guess is the deluxe option is bigger.
Special diets and food intolerances
I probably don’t need to reiterate here that all Garden of Vegan meals are 100% plant-based and suitable for a vegan diet. Their name gives that one away!
Each meal on the menu has a detailed ingredients list and nutritional guide. To make it easier to find suitable meals, the menu can be filtered to show meals that are free of soy, nuts, citrus, sesame, onion, grain, chilli, or garlic.
I’ve never seen any other service provide such strong options for people with individual food or ingredient intolerances.
Unfortunately, and understandably, Garden of Vegan can’t make modifications to individual meals to remove ingredients.
Is Garden of Vegan suitable for Coeliacs?
Every meal cooked by Garden of Vegan is 100% gluten-free. There’s no gluten or wheat used during the handling, preparation, or cooking of meals.
I’ve been speaking to the team at Garden of Vegan regarding their plans for a full gluten-free kitchen and they recently upgraded their kitchen so it never handles any ingredients that may contain gluten.
That means that you can already consider Garden of Vegan suitable for coeliacs. They are currently working through accreditation with Coeliac Australia which will further add confidence to anyone following a fluten-free diet.
Delivery Options
Delivery is available to “most of Australia”. Whilst there isn’t any more detailed information available, you are able to check your postcode on their postcode checker tool.
I tried out a few random postcodes and it appears delivery is available in select parts of every state except for Northern Territory.
The delivery dates available are fairly limited, with most places having only one day a week available. Here in metropolitan Sydney, I can choose between Friday, Saturday, or Sunday.
No specific timeslots, just 12am – 7am or 8am – 6pm which is very common for prepared meal deliveries. Fortunately, the meals can be left out safely for 6 – 8 hours in their insulated delivery box.
Delivery costs $14.95 to all postcodes unless you qualify for free delivery when you spend over $200. That’s likely around 12 – 15 meals, which is a relatively fair bar to qualify for free delivery.
Orders need to be submitted or managed before 11pm on Sunday each week, which is when you’ll be charged for any subscription orders.
How much does Garden of Vegan Cost?
As you’re able to select your own meals (and sizes), there isn’t a single set of prices for Garden of Vegan. Prices vary considerably even within each meal category:
| Meal Category | 300g Meal Price | 450g Meal Price | 600g Meal Price |
| Essentials | $15.95 – $16.95 | $18.95 – $19.95 | $23.95 – $25.95 |
| Comfort | $16.95 | $19.50 – $21.95 | $25.50 |
| Gourmet | — | $19.95 – $23.95 | — |
| Low Calorie | $16.95 – $17.95 | $19.50 – $20.50 | $25.50 – $26.50 |
| Sides (2-3 portions) | $18.95 – $20.95 |
This places Garden of Vegan firmly towards the premium end of the market, as one of the most expensive prepared meal services.
In this case, I can see that prices are dictated by the quality of the ingredients. Sourcing fully organic seasonal ingredients can’t be cheap, so this is reflected in the cost of meals.
My top tip for saving money is to take advantage of the 600g meal prices if you’re sharing meals with someone else. Sharing the cost takes your cost per portion down by around 20% and makes Garden of Vegan more reasonably priced.
Produce Boxes start at $45 for a standard veggie box, through to $95 for a deluxe fruit box.
Meal Plans are priced at the total cost of each individual meal, with a small 5% discount for committing to a plan.
Get $100 Off Across Your First 4 BoxesDiscover Garden of Vegan's 100% organic range today.
Featured Service
My Garden of Vegan Review Box
Now we’re on to the exciting part. What’s the Garden of Vegan experience actually like?
My first box was left in the lobby of my building at around 11am, right in the middle of the delivery window.
The box itself is fairly low-key and I had a slight issue where the tape hadn’t been applied to the edge of the box. It left a gap at the top but ultimately this wasn’t a major issue.
Inside, Garden of Vegan are following their eco-friendly roots by using recyclable insulated liners and cardboard where possible instead of plastic.
Pulling out all of my meals, I was immediately impressed by the vibrancy on display. Each meal looks great and I was super excited to dive in.
The meals all had between 6 to 8 days on their best-before dates, which is a pleasant surprise as no preservatives are used. I did eat some of the meals past the recommended date and had no issues, which ensures you have time to eat everything that’s delivered.
Are Garden of Vegan Meals Good?
It’s important to preface this by saying that I’m not vegan, although I do try to make sure I maintain a balanced diet that isn’t over-reliant on meat.
Forget describing these as “delicious for vegan meals”, everything I ate was truly delicious and can easily be compared with some of the best prepared meals you can buy from any service.
Not once did I miss having meat in any of these meals, especially because Garden of Vegan never resorted to using inferior “meat-like” substitutes.
Here are some examples of the reheated meals:
The texture of ingredients was (almost) always maintained, across a wide variety of ingredients. All of the dishes felt unique in their own way, each packing a punch on flavour.
I honestly can’t fault Garden of Vegan for how enjoyable their meals are.
Cooking the prepared meals
Each meal has reheating instructions printed on the label. These are the same for every meal:
- 3 minutes in the microwave
- 10 minutes in the oven.
- Gently heated on the stove.
I wish I had a bit more guidance on the recommended cooking method for each meal.
For example, I cooked the Enchilada Pie in the microwave, and it was delicious. However, I felt that reheating it in the oven would have given a crispier top and a more enjoyable meal.
I hope Garden of Vegan can adjust their labels to include a recommended cooking option for the best eating experience.
Managing Your Subscription
Garden of Vegan have clearly put a lot of time and energy into designing their site so it’s intuitive to use.
Individually skipping an order can be done at the click of a single button, or you can pause your subscription until a specified future date (a cool feature I wish more services offered!).
It’s also possible to order fortnightly deliveries instead of weekly.
Cancelling a subscription is incredibly easy. In fact, it’s probably too easy. Click on the cancel button and your subscription is immediately cancelled. It makes a refreshing change compared to services like HelloFresh who make you go through a 5-step cancellation process.
There’s also a 24-hour chat support window in case you have any questions. I’ve found them consistently helpful with any question I had.
My Overall Thoughts on Garden of Vegan
Garden of Vegan excels at providing a seamless prepared meals subscription. The website is incredibly easy to use, your subscription is simple to manage, the boxes are smartly packaged, and there’s a strong delivery network around Australia.
Then you have 100% organic meals using fresh, in-season ingredients that combine to make incredibly delicious meals. Enough to completely forget that meals don’t contain any dairy, gluten, meat, or oil.
The only hurdles to jump over are the price and variety of meals.
18 meals for lunch and dinner means eating the same meal once every 9 days, assuming the best-case scenario that you enjoy ever meal on the menu. There’s no doubt it would feel repetitive quickly.
Based on price alone, Garden of Vegan isn’t a service suitable for everyone. Buying their full meal plans covering breakfast, lunch and dinner could set you back over $2000 a month.
However, this is the premium you should expect to pay for the exceptionally high quality of ingredients. Having tried most of their menu, I firmly agree that they’re delivering meals ‘as close to nature as possible’.
Garden of Vegan is highly recommended.
Get $100 Off Across Your First 4 BoxesDiscover Garden of Vegan's 100% organic range today.
Competing Services
The most similar service available currently would be Soulara. They’re the most popular plant-based meal delivery service in Australia. Whilst the ingredient quality isn’t as high as Garden of Vegan, they are a more affordable option for vegetarians and vegans.
I’d love to hear about other people’s experiences with Garden of Vegan – were they similar to mine? Did you find my Garden of Vegan review useful? Let me know in the comments section below!
