I absolutely love the convenience of getting prepared meals delivered. Having healthy, tasty meals sat in the fridge ready to eat makes my daily evening routine much easier and much less stressful. Especially when I’m getting back from work late and the temptation of a takeaway is so strong!
With both My Muscle Chef and MACROS, they promise to not only provide convenience but also heavily contribute towards your fitness goals. Each meal is designed to help meet your calorific/macro targets to help you reach the body composition you want. Again, so much better than those takeaways.
As both services offer very similar products at a quick glance, I wanted to take a deeper dive into comparing My Muscle Chef vs MACROS. This comparison aims to help you decide which service is right for you.
Contents
My Muscle Chef vs MACROS: Quick Comparison & Discounts
Configurable Meal Plans
Additional Snacks, Sides and Protein Shakes
Best Tasting Meals in Australia
Try My Muscle Chef TodayGet $20 off your first order with code WELCOME20
Goals-Based Meal Plans
Fresh, Simple Dinners
2-Portion ‘Family’ Meals
Our comparison will look in detail at each service’s offering, food and cost before making a final recommendation for which service is right for you. If you want, you can click here to skip down to our recommendation.
My Muscle Chef vs MACROS: The Offering
We’ll start by look at the various products and services that each company provides, identifying any differences that are important to consider.
My Muscle Chef
My Muscle Chef have been serving prepared meals since 2013, becoming easily the largest and most disruptive meal delivery service in Australia. A selection of their meals can often be found in supermarkets like IGA and Woollies, with their full range only available from them direct.
Subscription Options: It’s very easy to either purchase a one-off box of meals, or subscribe to a regular delivery from My Muscle Chef. Their meals all fit into the categories of Muscle Gain, Performance or Calorie Control which act as filters to their menu. Through their website, you can fill in a few questions and they’ll recommend a personalised meal plan with your fitness goals in mind.
Meal Variety: With a rotating selection of 55 different meals available at any one time, there is always a good selection of meals to choose from. This includes 12 Plant-Based meals making the service suitable for vegetarians and even vegans. We found that like most services, My Muscle Chef focuses their meals on chicken and beef dishes.
Delivery Options: Delivery to over 4,200 postcodes across Australia means you’re very likely to be able to receive a My Muscle Chef delivery. The available delivery dates depend on the area you live in.
Additional Products / Extras: There are some interesting additional products including side dishes, which I quite enjoyed to get my calories up on gym days, protein shakes, breakfasts and snacks. This makes My Muscle Chef a quite comprehensive service that could make up your entire diet.
MACROS
Compared to My Muscle Chef, MACROS is a much newer service that was only launched in 2018. They pride themselves in providing ‘dietician-designed’ meals that have no dairy, no refined sugars and no MSG. Currently, the only place you can buy MACROS meals is through their website.
Subscription Options: MACROS offer no less than 7 different fitness plans. These include the core fitness plans that are Sculpt, Performance and Muscle Gain. The main difference between these meal plans is simply the size of the meals you receive (between 300g-450g). There are also plans that cover weight loss, plant-based food and two-person meals.
Meal Variety: There are just under 50 meal choices rotating each week. There’s a steady stream of around 2-3 new meals to try each week that can make your regular deliveries a bit more exciting. These choices always include at least 9 Plant-Based meals.
Delivery Options: MACROS cover most metropolitan areas, although you might struggle in more rural areas. There’s a handy postcode checker on their website.
Additional Products / Extras: MACROS currently only offer regular dinners, although the two-person meal subscription is a unique twist.
My Muscle Chef vs MACROS Service Comparison
These are the key differences you should consider when choosing which service to purchase:
- Weight Loss Plan: Whilst My Muscle Chef do offer a ‘Calorie Control’ meal plan, these meals are not as suitable for weight loss as the MACROS ‘Weight Loss’ plan where all the meals are under 350g in calories.
- Meal Variety: My Muscle Chef do offer slightly more variety than MACROS, although this can’t be considered a significant difference.
- Delivery Areas: My Muscle Chef are more likely to deliver to your area if you live in more rural parts of Australia.
- Additional Products: One of the benefits of choosing My Muscle Chef will be the access to various snacks, side dishes, protein shakes and breakfast meals. You can read more about these in our review of My Muscle Chef.
Overall, these two services have a very similar offering. I would suggest that My Muscle Chef just edges the better offering with their additional range of foods.
My Muscle Chef vs MACROS : The Food
Knowing the difference in the options provided by these two meal delivery services, it’s important to talk about how good their actual food is! This definitely comes down to a lot of personal preference, but hopefully I can give you a good idea about what you’ll receive.
My Muscle Chef Meals
Packaging: Meals arrive in shallow black plastic trays, with a cardboard information sleeve. They’re vacuum packaged so that the plastic film is covering the food, which is very different to how many other meal delivery services package their food. Cooking each meal is incredibly easy as you just need to pop the plastic container directly into the microwave, no messing around with poking holes in the lid. Each meal cooks in around 90 seconds.
Flavour: I can’t understate how impressive the flavour of most My Muscle Chef meals are. In fact, they generally tasted far better than anything I could have cooked up myself. Meals tend to be very well seasoned and spiced, with each ingredient contributing to a delicious meal.
Texture: The packaging and cooking process appears to be slightly magical as My Muscle Chef meals really deliver on a great food texture. No more soggy/mushy microwave meals. Even dishes like risotto retained a good bite, while the steak dishes were soft and buttery. It wasn’t always perfect, but generally I found My Muscle Chef meals to be the best microwave meals I have ever tasted.
My favourite My Muscle Chef meals included the Salmon Risotto, Korean Beef, Burrito Bowl and Chicken Nasi Goreng.
MACROS Meals
Packaging: In contrast to My Muscle Chef, the MACROS meals come in deep white plastic containers, often with 2 different sections. This means the rice/vegetables are generally split from the meat/sauce component of the dish. There’s a fairly standard plastic film over the top of the container, which you need to peel off slightly before microwaving. Each meal takes around 2 minutes to cook.
Flavour: I’ve found the taste of MACROS meals to generally be very good. There can be quite a bit of variation in quality, so it’s important to experiment and find the meals that you like the most. Dishes tend to provide quite basic flavours that rely on a simple sauce to bring the dish tomorrow. I consider MACROS meals to be on par with my own home cooking ability (not a chef!).
Texture: Unfortunately I have found MACROS meals to be generally quite poor on texture. Meat dishes tend to be quite tough/chewy whilst sauces can be very watery. If you’re just trying to eat a quick meal before/after a workout then this really doesn’t matter too much, however if you’re trying to enjoy a nice evening meal then it can be disappointing.
My favourite MACROS meals were the Chipotle Chicken, Plant-Based Protein Pesto and Turkey Larb Bowl.
Overall, I much prefer the taste and texture of My Muscle Chef meals. That’s the result of 8+ years of R&D on their recipes and packaging. I’ve already seen an improvement with MACROS over the last year, so I expect they’ll continue to improve their recipes.
Try My Muscle Chef TodayGet $20 off your first order with code WELCOME20
Before I compare the cost of each service, it’s worth considering the discounts you can get with each service. Taking advantage of a discount when you subscribe will make your first box incredibly good value, allowing you to make your own decision about the food. Simply click one of our unique discount links to get access to your money off.
My Muscle Chef vs MACROS : The Cost
Since we’ve already covered the discounts you can get with these services, it’s definitely time to look at the cost of each subscription. They’re a little different to compare exactly because My Muscle Chef offer different prices for their meals, so I’ll take a Median price for the meals available on their plan. I’ll compare that to a MACROS Performance plan which is their mid-range meal size.
You might be interested to find my industry analysis of the cheapest meal delivery service, allowing you to compare My Muscle Chef and MACROS against all the other prepared meal services.
Price of a weekly subscription
| Meals | My Muscle Chef | Macros |
|---|---|---|
| 7 | $72.80 | $76.65 |
| 10 | $104.00 | $105.00 |
| 15 | $152.10 | $149.25 |
| 18 | $177.84 | $175.50 |
| 21 | $196.56 | $194.25 |
| 24 | $224.64 | $214.8 |
My Muscle Chef and MACROS are very similar on their price point. Both services price their meals in a similar way, so it’s hard to recommend either service on price alone.
It’s worth noting that My Muscle Chef provides % discounts on the whole basket at certain numbers of meals (13, 16, 21 and 25). This means it always makes sense financially to pick one of these meal amounts. Notably, 24 meals costs $224.65 but 25 meals actually costs less at $221.00.
Cost per meal is roughly similar, starting at ~$10.40 and ending at ~$9.30 when you order large quantities.
Delivery Costs
| My Muscle Chef | MACROS |
|---|---|
| $15 – $20 | $10 – $15 |
Both services vary their delivery costs based on the delivery area and size of the box, so you’ll only know your actual delivery costs at checkout.
Whilst MACROS are slightly cheaper, My Muscle Chef do offer a $10 discount on shipping if you sign up to a regular subscription of meals (which you can cancel at any time).
Should I buy My Muscle Chef or MACROS?
I personally have a very clear preference for My Muscle Chef, having given them a rating of 8.4/10 compared to a score of 7.3/10 for MACROS (see MACROS review). I have found the quality of their meals to be consistently the best available in Australia, managing to deliver an incredible flavour and texture profile. The slightly wider variety of meals and access to snacks, breakfasts and side dishes also leans me to preferring My Muscle Chef. If you haven’t tried a prepared meal delivery service, then I highly recommend giving My Muscle Chef a try.
However, this is a very personal preference. MACROS meals are still very enjoyable and are clearly made from fresh, healthy ingredients. It makes sense to take advantage of the MACROS discount and try a few of their meals to see for yourself. If you aren’t a huge fan, then the worst-case scenario is that you cancel your subscription and got to eat cheap meals for a week.
These aren’t the only services available in Australia, so it’s also worth checking out my reviews of other meal delivery services.
Try My Muscle Chef TodayGet $20 off your first order with code WELCOME20