Going to the gym is easy. Lifting weights is fun and easy. The hard part of fitness, is sticking to a diet.
Whilst exercise is important, without a balanced diet you’ll struggle to earn that lean definition that you deserve. I’m sure I’ve heard the saying; “It doesn’t matter if you spend 10 hours in the gym every day, unless you eat clean you’re wasting your time”.
There just might be a simple cheat code for unlocking a clean diet, whilst still eating enjoyable good quality foods. It’s Muscle food. I’ve been using them now for almost five years, but I’ve ordered an hamper and I’m going to conduct a full musclefood review, showing you that eating clean can be fun and tasty.
As always, I’m only going to be conducting honest reviews on this platform to give you the information that you need. So, I’ve ordered my Muscle Food hamper & I’m going to get right into it.
Who are They? How do they Work?
Muscle Food are based in Nottingham, in the United Kingdom & have been delivering their services since 2013. Darren Beale was the founder & saw a huge gap in the bodybuilding market. He realised that they were training well, but their nutrition was completely off. Musclefood was born.
Musclefood was initially set up to provide bodybuilders with top quality meat, packed with protein. Back in 2013, this was a niche market but it has completely exploded as more and more people are getting into fitness, or want to eat cleaner foods.
Since then, they’ve won numerous awards for the quality of their products. Their focus is strictly on foods packed with protein, which allows fitness enthusiasts to focus on clean eating.
There are no physical stores for Muscle Food, as they operate via their website only. This allows them to keep overheads low meaning they can pass on their cost savings to you the customer, in form of discounts and hampers.
I didn’t order an hamper for this review, as I wanted to mix-and-match my own products to test. The hampers are extraordinary value though and provide a fantastic selection of foods, which ensure your pallet is always going to be trying something new. This is really important when eating clean, as eating chicken and rice everyday is a thing of the past. It’s so hard to stick to clean eating when your meals are boring, but Muscle Food have certainly helped us overcome the temptation of take-aways and fast-food.
The Ordering Process at Muscle Food
To start off, you must place your order. Navigate the Muscle Food store and add all the products that you want. They’ve updated their website recently and you can even shop for specific goals such as losing weight or toning up.
Other alternative ways to search include:
- Build Your Own Box: These come as £30, £50, £75 or £100 boxes and you can tailor your box for your exact requirements.
- Meal Prep: You can help MuscleFood perform your Meal Prep on your behalf by telling them the amount of meals you’d require.
- Hampers: The biggest bargains can be found in the hamper section, where MuscleFood pre-pack specific meat into the selection and ship this to you.
- Free Selection: Sometimes you might not want a specific hamper, or meal prep done for you. You can still add whatever products you need individually to your basket.
Once you’ve added all those items to your basket, it’s time to checkout. This includes signing up, entering your delivery address and billing details. Providing you’ve spent over £70, you’ll be able to get delivery for £1 to £2, however there are often free delivery promotions so keep your eyes out for those. Providing you aren’t ordering late at night, you should be able to order for delivery within the next two working days.
On delivery day, you’ll ne notified by email that your parcel is due for delivery.
I recevied the above email at 06:50AM, which gave me plenty of time to get ready for it. When I say get ready, I mean completely forget about it until the Ring Doorbell sets my dog off!
If you’re worried about the freshness of the food, I hope this puts your mind at ease. Muscle Food use what they call Advanced Packing Technology, which involves a Heavy Duty Cardboard Box for packaging. Inside the box, you’ll find an inner bag which has Temperature Controlled features. Once you rip this open, you’ll find your food, alongside Gel Ice Packs which can stay cold all day. Muscle Food report that this can keep your food fresh for 48hrs, but I didn’t want to waste any time in testing that!
I’ve been using Muscle Food since 2015, ordering at least once every 12 weeks. They’ve never lost my parcel, missed a delivery slot or made a mistake with my order.
What is their Product Range?
It wouldn’t be a muscle food review without showing you their product range.
Musclefood’s product range has grown immensely during the last few years. They started out with Chicken Breast Fillets as their main item, before adding steaks and eventually branching out to snacks, vegan foods and health supplements.
Muscle Food work hard to understand what it’s audience require & have adapted their ‘menu’ accordingly. They now cater for gluten free & vegan customers in addition to helping people lose weight, whilst eating tasty foods.
They now even offer a variety of Protein Pizzas; these honestly taste like a real cheat meal, yet they’re less than 400 calories each. They aren’t the cheapest at around £3 per pizza, but are well worth the moeny especially when you wouldn’t think twice about paying £17.99 for a Dominos’ Pepperoni Passion!
I have ordered the Buffalo Chicken, Mighty Meaty & Cheese Burger Pizzas. My biggest problem personally is getting bored of ‘diet’ food, so these help keep me on track and enjoying tasty foods. It’s still crazy to think that I can achieve weight loss whilst eating pizzas, but it’s definitely possible.
In 2021, Muscle Food have even started offering fresh fruit and vegetables, cupboard essentials such as Rice, Bread & Pasta. From the outside, it looks like they’re going all-out to compete with supermarkets. Ok, maybe not quite as far as offering toilet roll etc, but they’re definitely on a mission to become the UK’s go-to for Meat products.
They also stock products from big brands such as Reign, Grenade & Maxi Muscle, to name a few.
Levi Roots has recently partnered with Muscle Food, offering his caribbean twist alongside their award winning produce. This includes ready meals and Recipe Kits, which still work out to less than 450 calories per meal. You have to applaud MuscleFood, as keeping food exciting is one of the best ways to ensure that we stick to a clean diet.
What’s in a Muscle Food Hamper?
Sometimes, shopping for a large family on MuscleFood can work out a little more expensive. This is because you’re buying more of a premium-grade product, so it naturally will work out a little more costly for you. MuscleFood know this, which is why they developed their Hampers which offer a significant saving.
The only potential downside to the hampers, is that you can’t pick exactly what you want inside them.
It shouldn’t be too much of a problem, as most of these are packed with the basics such as Chicken Breasts, Rump & Sirloin Steaks & Mince. Some of the items also include bacon medallions, meatballs and sausages. I like the Pork Sausages, but I’m not the biggest fan of the Chicken Sausages. The Money Saving Meals for Two hamper contains 60 servings, costing just £65.
You can see all of their current hampers live on their website.
Better than Supermarkets?
On the surface, Musclefood does look quite expensive. However, when you break this doing into each individual serving, you’ll see that the prices are actually better than most supermarkets.
I fully understand that it won’t beat an Aldi special offer, but it will beat it hands-down in terms of quality. The Chicken doesn’t have any added water-weight and doesn’t shrink when exposed to heat in the pan. Aldi’s chicken breasts do.
I paid £85.85 for my MuscleFood selection, but this was a little more expensive as I didn’t use a pre-built hamper with discounts attached. I ordered a range of foods which would be used for my lunch or an evening meal.
My Order consisted of:
- Premium Chicken Breast Fillets – 5kg
- Tandoori Flavoured Boneless Chicken Thighs – 400g
- Lean Pork Sausages – 6 x 66g
- Extra Lean Beef Steak Mince – 125g
- 8 x The Heritage Range™ Rump Steaks – 170g
- 10 x Free Range Steak Burgers – 114g
- 10 x Ready Meals (Various Flavours)
On the surface, it doesn’t look like a great deal for £85, but let me break this down. I’ll have to cook some sweet potato fries, rice or something else to accomodate the chicken, but this contains 20 Chicken breasts alone. So there’s 20 base meals (the protein part of the meal).
There’s three additional portions worth of Tandoori thighs, two portions of sausages and a single portion of Steak Mince. This brings our total to 26 portions. Eight Rump Steaks and Ten Steak Burgers bring that to a total of 44 portions, with the 10 ready meals taking that to 54 total.
That’s a pretty good deal, working out at £1.58 per meal. Yes, I’ll have to still add some Rice, Potatoes or Cous-cous into the mix, but that will still ensure my serving is below £2 per meal. Even if you’re shopping on a budget, this is immense value. Not to mention the quality of food that you’re eating will be much better.
The MuscleFood Taste Test
I have placed many orders with MuscleFood, so I am definitely qualified to provide an honest taste test. There’s some items I don’t quite like, amongst others which I can’t get enough of.
Starting off with their most popular item, their Premium Chicken Breasts. I ordered 5kg of this alongside my usual order.
These are really high quality protein chicken fillets, with their best feature being that they don’t shrink to the size of a roast potato once cooking! This isn’t a shock as Muscle Food claim that these fillets contain no added salt & no added water.
It’s quite hard to comprehend a taste test into words, but what I noticed immediately with these chicken breasts is that they don’t have that ‘wet’ layer of texture which most supermarket chicken breasts have. After cooking two of these chicken breasts, the remainder will be frozen.
Muscle Food Ready Meals Review: High Protein?
This part of the review actually took me the longest, due to ordering a complete variety of flavours. I didn’t cook them all in one day, I simply noted down my thoughts after each evening meal. The Ready Meals I tested & their results were:
- Levi Roots Caribana Chicken Pot – 358 kcal. This was the one on my order that I thought I might not enjoy. It was bursting with flavour & the herbs and spices topped this one off perfectly.
- Chicken Curry with Noodles – 281 kcal. This one comes wuth Bombay sauce & the Noodles are even wholewheat. It tastes just as you would expect, although it’s actually pretty filling. You could probably use this one for your evening dinner & I’m shocked it’s under 300 calories.
- Bad Man Spicy Chicken & Potato Pot – 382 kcal. I ordered two of these, as Spicy food is amongst my favourite. The flavour of the curry marinade/sauce was phenonemal. There was quite a lot of baby corn included in the pot, but it was very filling.
- BBQ Pulled Pork & Potato Pot – 346 kcal. I ordered this to taste-test, although openly not enjoying butternut squash. Once cooked however, they tasted just like soft potatoes! I managed to eat all of them and I would order this meal pot again.
- Sausage, Bean & Potato Pot – 374 kcal. This contains all of the similar ingredients to a full english breakfast. The sausage is Cumberland, which I don’t enjoy as much. This tastes great, though.
- Cajun Beef & Rice Pot – 336 kcal. This one is a little well-seasoned and it’s one that I didn’t enjoy as much as the others. It didn’t taste Cajun to me and I probably won’t re-order this.
- Tikka Chicken & Rice Pot – 321 kcal. This is a really nice taste, although it’s not super saucy. It is however a fantastic lunchtime meal and one of my favourites.
- Sweet Chilli Chicken & Rice Pot – 366 kcal. This one tasted great, although it did smell the office kitchen out quite significantly! I’d order this one again though, much to the enjoyment of my colleagues.
Muscle Food Chicken Breasts vs Supermarket Chicken
I thought it would definitely be interesting to investigate the nutritional content against leading supermarket chicken breast fillets, although I haven’t ordered those to taste test. This will provide a clear understanding of nutrition against the pricing aspect, however you will have to make your own observations regarding if the chicken has been artificially enhanced with water. It’s been reported lots of supermarkets do this, and after the Horse Meat Scandal I wouldn’t be shocked.
After my taste test, I can confirm that the Muscle Food chicken is premium content with no enhancements as such.
| Supermarket | Protein per 100g | Fats per 100g | Calories per 100g | Cost per KG |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Muscle Food | 24g | 1.1g | 212 kcal | £5.60 |
| Asda | 31g | 1.7g | 138 kcal | £4.89 |
| Tesco | 24g | 1.1g | 106 kcal | £5.29 |
| Morrisons | 27.6g | 2.3g | 131 kcal | £5.72 |
| Sainsburys | 30.6g | 1.6g | 137 kcal | £4.84 |
| Aldi | 24g | 1.1g | 106 kcal | £4.79 |
The above table should make things much easier to understand & will save you from opening multiple tabs to compare this yourself. The Muscle Food chicken fillets look expensive on paper & are the second highest cost per kilogram. It’s worth noting here that Musclefood hand trim all excess fat, meaning you receive pure breast meat which doesn’t shrink in the pan. It’s definitely worth paying a little bit more for a product which is far superior.
Muscle Food Review: Final Thoughts
Anyone can benefit from a high protein, clean diet. It’s perfect if you’re looking to build lean muscle, lose weight or simply just taking more care of what you eat. Afterall, you can have the perfect exercise strategy, but without eating correct you won’t make the required gain.
Their produce has exceptional quality and it’s no surprise to see them as an award winning website. The fact that you can eat top quality produce and still achieve weight loss has to be applauded.
Musclefood is an excellent online company and they’re on a mission to tackle supermarkets with their protein packed foods. I’ll continue using their services, although I don’t have any subscriptions set myself. This is something I am considering, as it helps to bring the cost down a little bit.
If you’re looking for meal preparation, you can’t go wrong with their lunch pots. My advice at first would be to order a huge range so you can taste a wide variety of flavours, before deciding your favourites.
I’m sure once you try their products, you’ll be a continous user yourself. I’ll finish this review with some frequently asked questions.
I’ve been waiting on a delivery for two days. so I’ve had no shopping since. Considering I was getting a big box I’ve had to leave room for storage for food. And I’ve had a two day wait to get this situation resolved. And the best they could do is send it back out, with another week’s wait. Without even considering a voucher or knocking off, what I paid for delivery.
Very disappointing
Genuinely sorry to hear that Dominic! Whilst I don’t work for MuscleFood myself, I will add your reply here in an attempt to provide a transparent review.
I would have expected your delivery refunded or a Freebie, too! What do you think of the Food Quality, shipping experiences aside?
Thanks! Tom