I’m an RD Who Tried Epicured’s Meal Delivery Service. Here’s How It Went

Most meal delivery services offer the convenience and support of cook-it-yourself meal kits with portioned and prepped ingredients. Some go a step further and provide completely prepared meals that require even less effort. Unfortunately, a lot of them are off-limits to folks with specialized diets, since they have to be really careful about what ingredients are used in their food.

That’s why I was excited to learn about Epicured, a service that delivers the convenience of a prepared meal delivery service but also caters specifically to people who need low-FODMAP meals because they live with chronic digestive conditions like irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), inflammatory bowel disease, Crohn’s disease, ulcerative colitis, and small intestinal bacterial overgrowth. I have a lot of clients who would love such a service. They’re just as busy as everyone else and would appreciate the ease it could bring to their daily lives. Plus, Epicured’s menu also offers gluten-free, vegan, vegetarian, pescatarian, allergen-friendly, and low-sodium meals. So, I gave the service a try for one week, sampling a mixture of entrées, breakfast items, snacks, and desserts. Here’s what I thought about the whole experience.

Choosing the Meals

If you are not doing the elimination program, you’ll get to choose your own meals, which is what I did. I went with the most straightforward style of meal selection, a one-time order, and spent some time scanning the menu. My goal was to choose a variety of proteins, meal styles, flavor profiles, and temperatures, including some items beyond the savory entrées that make up the majority of the menu.

Epicured offers a relatively static menu of over 150 items, including entrées for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, as well as snacks, desserts, prepared proteins, sides, snacks, beverages, dressings, and sauces. While there is a bit of seasonality to the menu, most things are consistent year-round.

The entrées are a good mix of comfort classics like pulled BBQ chicken sliders or mac and cheese, with international favorites like tikka masala, Vietnamese rice noodle bowls, lasagna, or tacos. There are also salads, soups, and wraps, plus breakfasts that range from a fruit and yogurt bowl to chia pudding to egg dishes and pancakes. The small plates section is mostly prepared proteins, but they would work well for mix-and-match meals along with the sides of veggies and starches. In terms of snacks and desserts, there are assorted flavors of energy bites and various baked goods and puddings.

Choosing meals is as simple as selecting what you want and adding to your cart. For certain entrées, you can swap a protein out, and of course, with each item, you can review nutritional information if you like. Sort the menu by course or filter by diet filters like low-FODMAP, gluten-free, vegan, vegetarian, pescatarian, extra-sensitive for IBS symptoms, low-histamine, freezer friendly, several allergens, and more. These filters make it easy to find what you want, and I definitely had a hard time choosing because so many things appealed to me.

Ultimately, here’s what I chose for my meals and add-ons:

• Beef Stew With Rosemary Whipped Potatoes
• Thai Green Curry With Shrimp
• Za’atar Chicken With Quinoa Tabbouleh
• Falafel Wrap
• Harvest Salad
• Buckwheat Pancakes With Strawberries and Brie
• Coconut Macarons
• Lemon Coconut Energy Bites
• Turmeric Latte

My shipment from Epicured came on time and was well-packaged, with the meals all feeling refrigerator-level cool. The box’s interior is lined with insulation, and several ice packs are inside for cooling. The meals are packaged into single-serving plastic trays with lids, a paper sleeve, and a wraparound label, which does a great job of keeping everything in place.

The labels are easy to remove, so your meal tray slides out and is ready for reheating. Much of the packaging is recyclable, including the trays and lids, as well as the internal containers that hold more liquid ingredients. However, the labels are not recyclable, and the ice packs need to be recycled at a special facility, so they can’t be put in your curbside bin in most cases. Overall, the packaging is effective at its main job of keeping your food safe, clean, and cool.

Cooking/Preparing the Meals

One of the biggest highlights about ordering from Epicured is that no cooking is required. Many of the items I ordered, including the coconut macarons, lemon energy bites, falafel wrap, and harvest salad, didn’t even need heating and were eaten cold, straight from the fridge. For those items that did need heating, like most of the entrées, I found that the instructions worked well; they didn’t offer a specific time frame but rather told you what to remove from the trays, including any plastic sauce containers or other components housed in plastic, and to heat in short increments of 30 seconds, until the items were heated through.

With some meals, like the beef stew, shrimp curry, and za’atar chicken, some of the components within the containers were stored separately (such as the tray with the beef stew, which kept the stew in a plastic container inside the meal tray, next to the potatoes). This made it so that the ingredients didn’t slop together during transit, and if you had a meal with one component meant to be eaten cold and the other hot, you could achieve that without a lot of fuss about separating items. Overall, reheating the items was easy and effective, which felt like a real bonus of the service that contributed to my overall enjoyment of the experience.

Tasting the Meals

When it comes to flavor, it’s important to understand that the low-FODMAP diet can be quite limited, especially in terms of common (and beloved) ingredients like onion and garlic. When you’re not able to use these, especially if you’re limiting other flavoring agents like salt for medical purposes, it can be hard to achieve some of the layered, complex flavors people usually enjoy.

That said, it’s easy to tell that Epicured goes to great lengths to build flavors without these ingredients, utilizing herbs and spices in particular. This approach comes through really well in the beef stew, which had a lovely richness and strong but pleasant notes of rosemary, as well as in the mint dressing for the harvest salad and the Thai green curry with shrimp. All of these I would gladly order again, but I might think twice before going for the falafel wrap, which was pretty dry, with dressing that didn’t pack much punch.

Similarly, I think I’d skip the za’atar chicken, which was pretty simple and could work for those who enjoy mellow flavors, but for me it was lacking a bit. I also enjoyed the blueberry buckwheat pancakes, which were chock-full of berries. The little nibble of brie it included was nice, but it felt like an odd addition.

The turmeric latte tasted very nice, and I drank it cold, but the lemon energy bites were not a hit for me (indeed, they were a miss). They did have a good lemony flavor, but the texture of the oats felt dry, and I didn’t enjoy them. I did, however, absolutely love the coconut macaroons and would order them again without a doubt.

Epicured’s medical-grade meals are pretty unique, and there aren’t very many other services in the same class. However, there is one other meal delivery service that offers fully prepared meals for accommodating low-FODMAP diets that is worth noting: ModifyHealth.

ModifyHealth doesn’t offer as wide a menu, but it does have a rotating meal selection, whereas Epicured’s is static. ModifyHealth may also be more reasonably priced, depending on what you order from Epicured.

While some other services, like Territory Foods, Provenance Meals, and Hungryroot, are not technically low-FODMAP, they do offer some gluten-free and dairy-free options, which could help with some of the elimination protocols. Territory and Provenance are similar to Epicured in that they offer prepared meals. Hungryroot does more simplified meal kits with minimal cooking, so be aware that some assembly is required if you go that route.

If you’re looking for convenient meals that are medically designed to be gluten-free and low-FODMAP friendly, Epicured definitely needs to be on your radar. While we recommend working with a healthcare professional before taking on the restrictions of this diet, these meals could be highly useful for kick-starting the diet. At the same time, you’ll learn how to navigate FODMAPs, which can support you through the elimination phase and beyond. While the price point might limit accessibility for some, if you have the budget, we think it’s worth a try for individuals, couples, or even college students who have these dietary constraints.

To determine which meal delivery services are worth our readers’ time, trust, and money, we set up a team of health experts, writers, and journalists to test and evaluate over 50 different meal delivery services. We looked at multiple factors for each company, including but not limited to:

• Ease of use
• Menu desirability
• Functionality of add-ons
• Arrival and packaging
• Flavor and ingredient quality
• Nutritional status
• And much more

Our author, Tori Martinet, RD, is a licensed registered dietitian with over 10 years of experience in culinary nutrition and the food industry. She has been writing about meal delivery services since 2021 and is widely published on a range of food, nutrition, and cooking topics in publications like Eating Well, Everyday Health, Food & Wine, The Spruce Eats, and more.