Review: Tempo Prepared Meals

Perhaps I am easily impressed. But I tend to think of the modern prepared delivery meal service as a marvel of technology.

Tempo, the spin-off prepared-meal subscription service from Home Chef meal kits, specializes in meals that look like TV dinners but have never been frozen. The boxed beef barbacoa and salmon au poivre and chicken pesto meals that arrived in my refrigerator this March had instead been cooked in a commissary kitchen days before, then boxed up and mailed in a package kept cool with (mostly) recyclable cold packs.

Even after arriving, each meal remained not just safe to eat but actually flavorful for a week or more. That beef barbacoa, when I heated it in a Ninja Crispi air fryer (my current preferred option for leftovers cooking), was not just still moist but actually tender, served alongside jasmine rice dotted with corn and sauced with a light poblano cream sauce. It was probably even better than the barbacoa I could get from the (mediocre, I'll grant) food cart down the street.

Photograph: Matthew Korfhage

Photograph: Matthew Korfhage

Not every meal was as good as that one, and Tempo could do with a bit more variety each week. But the fact remains: A mix of regional kitchens, multiparty shipping logistics, and modified atmosphere packaging had colluded to create a situation I still find a little bit marvelous. A week's worth of still-fresh meals arrived at my door from far away, ready to heat at my leisure as long as 10 days later—without resorting to a bunch of chemical preservatives. Wild! We should all be more amazed, more often.

Tempo stands among the best ready-to-heat, prepared meal subscriptions I've tried—and I've tried a lot of them. This can admittedly be a low bar. These remain reheated meals designed for maximum convenience. And at $11 to $13 a serving, they cost more than both frozen Stouffer's and cheap takeout.

But unlike cheap takeout, Tempo meals are composed in consultation with dietitians, and offer balanced macros that can be tailored to protein-forward and GLP-1 diets. Each is a simple and mostly wholesome meal portioned for a typical lunch. Most have a clearly delineated protein, starch, and veg. I and a colleague taking GLP-1 medication spent a week apiece tasting and testing a total of 14 Tempo meals. Here's how it went.

How Tempo Works

Photograph: Matthew Korfhage

First things first: Yes, Home Chef is the Kroger meal kit. Tempo's parent company, Home Chef, was among the early entrants to meal kit subscriptions, founded more than a decade ago in Chicago. The brand was snapped up by supermarket giant Kroger in 2018. But the production facilities remain independent, and lately I've noticed fewer Kroger stores stocking Home Chef in their deli departments.

Tempo is a spin-off brand and service from Home Chef, geared toward offering tailored mail-order diet plans. When you go to the Tempo website, after offering up your zip code and email address, you'll be asked a short series of questions about what you want out of life: whether diet plans or ingredients you hope to avoid.

Meal cost is between $11 and $13 a serving, depending on how many meals you want delivered each week, plus $11 a week in shipping. Usually, the introductory week costs significantly less, with additional military and student discounts also available. Generally, the first package arrives about a week after you sign up. You can choose which day of the week your first order will arrive, and this will remain consistent on subsequent weeks.

Once refrigerated, the meals remain good for seven to 10 days, with expiration dates stamped on each box. This longevity is mostly due to the modified atmosphere packaging technology that flushes out oxygen and replaces it with other gases carefully calibrated to help prevent spoilage. This tech has improved significantly in recent decades, leading to longer shelf lives in supermarket items and in prepared meals like these.

Pro-Protein Meals

Photograph: Matthew Korfhage

Like a lot of meal kits these days, Tempo caters especially to those looking to make sure they get their protein on—and who don't want to overdo it on carbs. Among the 25 or so meals available each week, as many as two-thirds of the Tempo meals might be marked “protein-packed,” with more than 30 grams of protein. Vegetarians might only find a single meal or two: This is a meat-eater's kit.

Mostly, Tempo's meals take traditional middle-American form: a big protein, some veggies on the side, maybe some pasta or rice. Adventurous eaters shouldn't expect much more exotic than a “Thai sweet chili salmon” with bok choy, or a Cajun-spiced chicken thigh. With just a couple dozen meals on the menu each week, Tempo is gently catering to the broadest possible palate.

This is far from how I usually eat. If anything, I overspice. But I was surprised to find myself enjoying this mostly simple fare, whether heated in a conventional oven or dumped from the box and heated in an air fryer for a little extra crisping.

The aforementioned barbacoa was a highlight, a tender sauced filet flaking off at the touch of a fork. But so was a “grilled sous-vide” chicken breast slathered in a creamy garlic Dijon sauce, alongside surprisingly fresh-seeming green beans and blistered grape tomatoes.

Photograph: Matthew Korfhage

Photograph: Matthew Korfhage

I am afraid of chicken breast in most prepared meals: It's almost always dry and often downright chalky. The fake-looking grill marks stamped onto the breast in most meals from Tempo did very little to alleviate these fears. But I was pleasantly surprised in this case. The chicken was more sous vide than grilled, moist within and prone to pulling apart like the product of a slow-cooker.

As a child of the Pacific Northwest, I liked a salmon dish less. The filet tasted like limp Atlantic farm salmon, which I otherwise avoid. This said, I was perfectly good with the black-pepper cream sauce served atop the salmon and the hash of red potatoes and creamy-sauced spinach served alongside it. It remained a mostly healthful, balanced meal at low effort.

But I should note that I'm grading on a curve, here. None of these meals tasted as good as they would have when first cooked. And while proteins and sauces were surprisingly well-managed (though not very zippy), veggies often fell prey to the sogginess endemic to all precooked meals. Reheated broccoli, no matter what you do, will always somehow just be reheated broccoli.

The meals are also hardly designed to stuff you. Most hover in the range from 400 to 600 calories. And so if you use these meals for dinner as well as lunch, you'll either supplement with other food or find yourself on a weight-loss plan.

Winner Winner, So Much Chicken Dinner

Photograph: Matthew Korfhage

Variety is also a concern. My eight meals were chosen from among the full complement of two dozen meals or so that are available on any given week. But even so, I saw that same chicken breast, zebra-striped grill lines and all, on three dishes.

If you have eating restrictions, you'll likely see even more repetition. My colleague Kat Merck, who tested GLP-1-appropriate meals—and also stated a preference for no fish—found herself drowning in a sea of chicken on the six meals she tried. She found the portions appropriate to those on GLP-1 meds, and appreciated that the meals offered her the proteins she needs to maintain muscle mass even while chemically un-hungry.

But still: chicken. After eating five of her six meals, she wrote, “I don't think I had one I didn't end up liking, but they were absolutely repetitive. Chicken chicken chicken chicken.”

The sixth meal she ate, a mushroom cream chicken, was the only utter failure. The chicken tasted different from the chicken in other dishes either of us tried, she noted: thick, dry, slathered in viscous cream with no sign of the advertised mushrooms. It was a little sad, a reminder of TV dinners past.

But if anything, that failed meal cast into relief just how surprisingly well-managed most of the proteins turned out to be. Both Merck and I were also happy to see the occasional chicken thigh, and not just breast, in our meals. For the record, the thigh was better: Thigh is almost always better.

The Tempo meals might be a little staid. And none were exciting, quite. But they were easy, nutritious, balanced, and comforting, without relying on a pile of unhealthy sodium and carbs to be palatable. Which is to say I was relieved and grateful to have them in my fridge, while working from home with scant time to think about lunch. For many, this feeling will be well worth $12 a meal.

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