Finding time to prepare dinner each evening can be draining, yet the cost of restaurant meals quickly outpaces what you'd spend making food yourself. For anyone seeking a middle ground that simplifies weeknight cooking, meal kits might be exactly what you need. As a bonus, meal kits have never been a better deal than when compared to the cost of groceries. 

Through my work testing these services at CNET, I've grown fond of options like Blue Apron, Marley Spoon and HelloFresh. With an upcoming cross-country move eating into my schedule and mental energy, I've gravitated toward one particular cooking method. I'm not referring to choosing chicken over beef -- I mean sheet-pan dinners. 

Here's what makes them so appealing.

Sheet-pan meals are almost completely fool-proof 

Lately, as I'm scouring meal kit service websites, I've noticed that more and more sheet-pan recipes are appearing. These are meals that cook all at once in the oven on one or two sheet pans and require very little preparation. 

In my experience, these types of meals shorten overall cooking time. While the entire meal (sides included) is baking, I have time to clean up the little mess I made while preparing the meal, and even end up with a bit of relaxation time. With sheet-pan meals, I can still enjoy a home-cooked meal in a fraction of the time it usually takes to cook dinner. It's a win-win situation in my book. 

Some sheet-pan meals take just five minutes of active work

While some meals still require a little prep work, like chopping or dicing vegetables, others, like the one above, require almost none. For my salmon dish, all I had to do was season the salmon with salt and pepper, rinse the produce and snap off the tips of the green beans. The whole process took me less than five minutes. Some recipes even come with pre-cut vegetables to save more time.

Sheet-pan meals are often cooked in the oven, but I recently experimented with making a couple in the Wonder Oven Pro, and they turned out just as well. If you have a toaster oven large enough for your meal, you can absolutely use it instead of your traditional wall oven if you prefer.

One-pot or one-pan meals are just as easy

You may also see some meals labeled as one-pan meals rather than sheet-pan meals, but there is only a slight difference between the two. Sheet-pan meals are often cooked in the oven while one-pan (or one-pot) meals are cooked on the stovetop. However, both types offer essentially the same thing: a full meal cooked in a single piece of cookware rather than several. You can think of these types of meals as a way to have less mess, less cooking stress -- and still a homemade dinner.

Do all meal delivery services have sheet-pan meals?

It's hard to say definitively that every service offers sheet-pan meals, given how many are available, but nearly all the services we've tested do. 

Some recent recipes we've seen include sheet pan pork and hoisin-glazed persimmon from Blue Apron, one-pan cantina shrimpfajitas from HelloFresh and low-carb sheet pan cabbage parm from Marley Spoon (our top pick in 2026).

Aside from making weeknight dinners easier, my favorite thing about these types of recipes is that they're usually very easy to recreate, with or without the meal kit. The salmon dish above, for instance, has become a part of my weekly dinner rotation even when a meal kit isn't helping me stay fed. 

Another new trend worth mentioning… 

You may already know how useful having an air fryer can be, and it seems as though meal kit companies are catching on, too. 

On many recipes, Blue Apron now offers alternative air-fryer instructions for specific steps. So instead of turning on your oven for a potato or veggie side, the service explains how to prepare them in the air fryer.

Although there aren't currently recipes that are fully cooked in the air fryer the way sheet-pan meals are, there are plenty that can help cut down on cooking time. We suspect that additional meal kit companies will soon cater to this trend as well.