Tempo Review
Preparing meals in advance is the simplest way to maintain a healthy diet throughout the week and stay committed to your goals. However, dedicating part of a leisurely Sunday to strategize for the upcoming week, gather ingredients, and assemble everything is a commitment not many are willing to make.
This is why meal delivery services are a true blessing, especially those offering a diverse range of quickly prepared options. They significantly alleviate the complexity of maintaining a healthy diet, sparing you the need to invest hours of effort into preparing meals for the entire week. However, it’s worth questioning whether all these services are of the same quality. With people’s daily schedules becoming increasingly hectic and the escalating costs of options like takeout, it’s not surprising that prepared meal delivery services are gaining popularity.
Tempo represents Home Chef’s line of prepared meals, delivering fresh, protein-packed options nationwide. These meals only require a few minutes in the microwave before being ready to enjoy, making them an excellent choice for busy work-from-home lunches or late nights at the office.
Tempo Highlights
Low-calorie but high-protein meals
Meeting daily nutritional goals can be challenging, particularly for individuals leading active lives with hectic schedules. This is why Tempo curates its weekly menu with meals containing 30-plus grams of protein and staying under 600 calories.
Moreover, Tempo places a priority on incorporating fresh vegetables into every meal, ensuring that users can effortlessly achieve a balanced and nutritionally dense meal with minimal effort.
Intuitive user experience
Navigating Tempo’s website is remarkably easy, and making adjustments to your subscription is consistently quick and effortless.
When you sign up for Tempo, the survey will inquire about your nutritional priorities (such as protein-packed and nutrient-rich). Subsequently, it will ask about your dietary preferences, including options like being calorie-conscious, carb-conscious, or vegetarian. Additionally, you can specify if there are any protein types you’d like to avoid.
Factors that Need Improvement
Meals lack Home Chef’s flavor quality
Both the teriyaki beef with broccoli and quinoa, as well as the kung pao chicken with broccoli and brown rice, exhibited a consistently over-salted taste. Additionally, the broccoli in both dishes was reported to be excessively mushy, providing an off-putting texture.
Limited menu options particularly for individuals with specific dietary restrictions
Tempo’s weekly selection of 20 meal options appears less varied compared to competitors like CookUnity, which boasts hundreds of options each week. The limited variety is especially noticeable with repeated meals featured regularly.
For individuals with dietary restrictions, such as being vegetarian or gluten-free, the available options from Tempo’s weekly selection of 20 meals become even more limited. There are only a few meat-free choices each week, and most of them tend to have lower protein content compared to meat-inclusive meals.
Cooking instructions are not customized for each individual meal
The recommended way to prepare Tempo Meals is to either microwave them for three minutes, followed by a one-minute standing period before consuming, or to bake them in a 325°F oven for 30 minutes.
While each meal has its unique characteristics, potentially needing different microwave and oven methods to reach the recommended temperature of 165°F, the instructions on each package remain consistent. Notably, there are no provided recommendations for heating the meals on a stovetop.