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What I’m doing isn’t technically cheating. But it does feel a lot like winning.
Factor (previously Factor 75) is the microwavable meal kit from meal delivery service HelloFresh (8/10 WIRED Recommends)—or at least, it is ever since the meal-kit giant acquired the Chicago-founded food brand in 2020. But for at least half my meals, I haven’t been using the microwave. I’m using an air fryer, specifically the Ninja Crispi (7/10, WIRED Recommends) that allows me to put wet ingredients below the crisper plate, and proteins or potatoes atop the crisper.
And so now my potatoes are crisp and my pork chop and mushrooms took on some genuine browning, while the excess cream sauce heated beneath the crisper. As premade, reheatable meals go, this truffle mushroom pork chop plate from Factor is about as good as it gets. The pork is still a little juicy, not overdone even on the second heating. The cream sauce is cream sauce. The herb-crusted potatoes possess the air fryer equivalent of wok hei. But especially, the mushrooms maintained their integrity.
The Factor delivery meal kit is not cheap, I’ll note; food that someone else has already cooked for you rarely is. Factor’s meals are never frozen, but rather are prepared weekly in the company’s commissary kitchens and shipped out in ice-packed boxes full of individually packaged, TV-dinner style trays that the company cutely likes to call “bentos.”
At full price, each of these meals can run from $12 to $15 apiece including shipping, with a minimum of six meals per week, though the company tends to offer steep discounts for the first week or month. You can choose among 45 meals weekly, each potentially tailored to vegetarian, carb-avoidant, calorie-restricted, or everything-goes options—with individually priced add-ons if you want, (excellent) smoothie delivery or (somewhat less excellent) breakfast.
The full-price meal option tends to fall in the price range less than most delivery food but far more than frozen TV dinners—comparable, perhaps, to the ready-to-heat meal boxes you might find in your local supermarket deli section.
A Big Improvement
The quality of that pork chop and potato plate was already a bit of a surprise, even though I’d gone off-script to improve it. But the tenderness, char, juiciness, and blessed pinkness of a chimichurri filet mignon slab was nothing short of startling, given that I’d cooked it in the microwave.
Factor fared well in general on the texture and character of its proteins, usually a tough ask for a reheated meal. Heated, frozen, then reheated chicken breast tends to have the character of wet chalk. A never-frozen chicken breast from Factor had the texture of … wait for it … chicken breast.
Factor’s selling point over other ready-to-heat meal kits has always been twofold. One is that its meals are friendly to keto and other versions of high-protein and carb-conscious diets. The other is that its microwaveable meals have never been frozen, leaving open the possibility for actual texture in one’s meal—a light crispness to the green beans, say. Or the grill char and soft give of a medium-rare filet mignon.
But in past years, those two selling points seemed to interfere with each other. Factor, noted my colleague Louryn Strampe in her 2024 assessment (6/10, WIRED Review), fell prey far too often to the porridgy and cauliflower-heavy “mush-on-mush” school of carb-avoidant fare. The food failed on texture, she wrote, in somewhat more colorful terms.
But ever since HelloFresh bought Factor, the menu has been slowly evolving to heartier fare with more chew and snap. Starches now veer to potato wedges, coconut lime rice, or al dente forbidden rice. The green beans, too often overdone even at restaurants, had a surprising and welcome tautness. (One can see this evolution by looking at old menus through the magic lens of Wayback Machine.)
Over time, Factor has evolved into the best ready-to-heat meal delivery service I’ve so far tasted.
Mitigating Factors
But this isn’t to say Factor has solved the issues inherent to ready-made delivery meals. There’s the cost, of course, more than most could afford as a full substitute for cooking: A full week of lunch and dinner for one would run about $170, with shipping.
And pre-cooked meals will never quite be as good as fresh-prepared meals: It will always be a balancing act to avoid the twin terrors of sogginess and rubberiness in reheated food. And for every crisp green bean or air-fryer charred broccoli, there’s a limp zoodle.
Factor has not entirely rid itself of the mushy or gummy meals my colleague complained about in the past, especially on meals catered to keto or gluten-restricted diets. A couple “ragu” dishes, whether beef or eggplant, were sodden messes. A gluten-free pancake breakfast, made with rice and tapioca flour, was dense, gummy, and best avoided.
On the best-tasting meals, mostly those with filets of salmon or steak or chicken atop whole starches like potato or rice, much of the good flavor nonetheless arrives with a liberal application of sodium and fats—making Factor best used in moderation, not as a full meal solution.
But if a microwave meal will always be graded on a curve, the trade-off is ease—a meal that arrives premade at the house, without the indignity of being frozen in the meantime. It’s a solution for those with more money than time; those who, for any number of reasons, might have difficulty preparing their own meals; and those on restricted or protein-positive diets who can let others do the work of tailoring ingredients. In these cases, the variety and the ease Factor offers could be a great help indeed.
The hope is that Factor will evolve alongside the modern kitchen, which now generally includes an air fryer, a toaster oven, or a device that’s a mix of the two. Each of these is better equipped to liven up a pre-cooked meal better than a microwave, and requires only a few minutes more to do so. Reps for Factor say the team is “exploring” the idea of accommodating those who’d rather cook in convection devices. From my own improvised results, I can attest there’s gold in them hills.
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