Trifecta vs Factor: Which is better for you?

These days there’s a plethora of choices to get fresh and tasty meals delivered to your door. Services like Blue Apron and Hello Fresh offer meal kit deliveries.

Meanwhile, services like Factor 75, Freshly, and Trifecta focus on delivering ready-to-eat meals. The main selling point of these services is saving time during your day as there is no cooking involved.

Unlike Freshly, which we reviewed here, Factor and Trifecta take this a step further by providing meals with a focus right balance of macros, healthy ingredients, and the ability to focus on specific diets. Both of these services are more on the expensive side but the quality of meals seems to reflect that as well.

I looked into both services to see how they stack up against each other, which one is better depending on your lifestyle, and what are the strengths and weaknesses of each delivery service.

I broke out my research based on several measurable categories: average price, the plans available, menu, prep time, ease of customization, and customer service.

Too Long; Didn’t Read

Price	Factor
Menu	Tie
Meal Prep	Tie
Ease of Customization	Factor
Customer Service	Trifecta
Bonus: Ordering & Delivery	Factor

While these two services have their similarities and are very comparable, I think I am going to have to go with Factor. Although you can’t go wrong with either meal delivery service, Factor ultimately offers just a tad more with very similar quality and ingredients.

Plans & Pricing

When deciding which meal delivery service to try, pricing may be one of the first questions that comes to mind. So in this review, I will lead with the pricing section and try to compare several different plans offered by Factor and Trifecta.

Winner: Factor is the winner here, they offer lower cost per meal and more flexible plan options

Neither of these meal delivery services are on the cheap side. Factor plans start from $15 per meal on a 4 meal per week plan. This comes out to roughly $60 per week plus shipping and taxes.

Trifecta’s plans, on the other hand, are a little bit more confusing. The lowest cost plan I could find is for 7 meals for $110.99 per week. This comes out to roughly $15.85 per meal.

While this may seems comparable to Factor’s 4 meal a week plan, Factor’s plans with more meals start to become a little bit cheaper per meal. For example, a comparable plan on Factor is 6 meals per week and that comes out to about $12.83 per meal or $76.98 per week.

Here’s a little more detail about what plans are available in Factor:

You can choose anywhere from 4 meals a week to 18 meals per week depending on what you are looking for.

Trifecta doesn’t have an easy image I can share like this so I created the below chart to compare some of their meal plans. One thing I noticed about Trifecta is that they do not have nearly as many plan options as Factor. There’s essentially just four plans: 5 breakfasts and 5 entrees, 7 entrees, 10 entrees, and 14 entrees. You do have the option to add breakfasts to each of the entrée only plans so there is some customizability there.

Focusing on the prices of Trifecta plans, I broke it out based on meals that have meat, and meals that do not (the Vegan and Vegetarian plans). The costs below are per week.

	7 Entrees	10 Entrees	14 Entrees
Meals with meat	$110.99	$157.99	$219.99
Meals without meat	$99.99	$134.99	$179.99

If you want to know how much you would be paying per meal, don’t worry, I crunched those numbers and did the math for you. Here is the same breakdown but with costs per meal:

	7 Entrees	10 Entrees	14 Entrees
Meals with meat	$15.85/meal	$15.79/meal	$15.71/meal
Meals without meat	$14.28/meal	$13.49/meal	$12.85/meal

Both services start at about the $15 price mark per meal. However, with Factor you can get your cost per meal reduced with more meals. Those savings cannot be seen with Trifecta even when ordering bigger boxes.

Shipping Cost

In regards to shipping, both services seem comparable.

Trifecta advertises a flat rate of $9.99 per box to anywhere in the continental United States. While Factor doesn’t have a flat rate, the shipping cost depends on location and size of the box, when I bought my 6 meal box with shipping to Texas, my shipping rate came out to $9.99 as well.

Menu

What’s on the menu? What will you be eating with either of these services? How much variety is offered? These are important questions to ask before deciding which meal delivery service to pick.

Winner: Well it depends…Factor is the winner for menu variety and choice. Trifecta is the winner if you have a strict diet to follow.

There are a lot of deciding factors when it goes into picking what’s right for you. So I will do my best to break down the menu of both services a little deeper.

Amount of Meals to Choose

When looking at the menus for both services, I was a little disappointed with the choices (or lack of) available with Trifecta.

When I visited Factor, they had 32 different meal options and advertised that new recipes rotate in weekly. While ordering a box, I was able to pick which meals I wanted and was able to filter based on several dietary categories (I will get into those next).

Trifecta, on the other hand, doesn’t let you choose which meals you receive weekly. Instead, their service is more focused on a diet and/or powering your workouts. They have 6 different lifestyle plans and you have to pick one. From there, you will receive meals each week that are tailored to your nutrition goals.

Trifecta does also advertise that they have over 25 recipes with new ones coming in weekly. Trifecta focuses on healthy eating catered to your dietary choices while utilizing farm fresh ingredients.

If you are someone that wants to stick to a diet and you aren’t too picky, it seems like Trifecta is a good choice. If you are less strict in your diet and want a little more choice, you can’t go wrong with Factor.

Dietary Choices

This is where Trifecta differentiates itself the most from other meal deliver services. According to their website, they focus their attention on providing meals with balanced macros and organic, fresh ingredients. However, this is not a knock on Factor. I was still pleasantly surprised by how many choices Factor had. I will review both here.

Since you don’t get to pick your meals with Trifecta, you have to select a meal plan that aligns with your goals. They have 6 to choose from. The meal plans that are available:

• Clean Eating – simple meals with proteins, organic vegetables, and whole grains
• Whole30 Approved – meals with whole30 compatible ingredients, portion controlled, and nutritionally balanced
• Paleo – dairy-free and grain free meals with grass-fed protein and organic vegetables
• Keto – meals with low carbs, healthy fats, and quality proteins
• Vegan – meals with organic ingredients and plant-based proteins
• Vegetarian – meals with plant protein, organic vegetables, and healthy carbs

And if you are not sure which one is right for you, don’t worry. Trifecta offers a simple quiz you can take. If you are still not sure, no problem. You can easily talk to one of their nutritional coaches at no extra charge. They will be able to guide you along your journey whether that is losing weight, building muscle, or just maintaining your current lifestyle.

While Factor isn’t as in depth with their choices, they have 4 different categories that you can filter meals on. The four options are Keto, Calorie Smart (low calorie), Vegan & Veggie, and Chef’s Choice (all of the above). On their website, when choosing your meals, you can select one of those options to filter down to see meals that fit one of the specific categories or browse all the meals in one view.

Overall, if you are someone that wants to stick to a Paleo, Whole30, Vegan or Vegetarian diet, Trifecta is absolutely the way to go. I haven’t seen any other meal delivery service be as focused and detailed as they are. But if you are a little bit more flexible and just want to eat healthy, than Factor might be right for you.

Menu Variety

If you are like me, you don’t want to be eating the same thing every week, you want a little variety in your life. Well you are in luck. Both of these services rotate new recipes each week. With Factor you get to select which ones you will receive. And with Trifecta, they will simply send you new meals each week. On Trifecta’s website they advertise that their menu changes weekly to utilize only the freshest ingredients from their local farmers.

However, I’m going to have to give this category to Factor simply because you can choose to try new meals or stick with a favorite from last week. Although, there is something to be said about not worrying about logging in each week and having to browse tens of recipes and choose. If you are somebody that has choice paralysis, Trifecta may be the winner for you in this category as well.

Meal Prep

This category is pretty even. Unlike other meal delivery services like Blue Apron and Dinnerly, both Factor and Trifecta deliver ready to eat meals to your doorstep. All you have to do is heat up and you are ready to eat.

Winner: Tie

Both of these services deliver meals in microwave-safe containers so all you have to do is stick in the microwave for 3-4 minutes. If your plans change and you have to skip a meal, just stick the package in the freezer and save it for later.

I will add that Trifecta has directions on the box to heat up your meals in a microwave, oven, or even a skillet. I have tried all three and I think oven is the best method in terms of ease and saving the flavor.

Ease of Customization

Winner: Factor

While Trifecta offers 6 different categories of meals, which is 2 more than Factor, it does not give you the ability to pick which meals you will receive on a week to week basis. This alone makes Factor the clear winner in this category.

With Factor, you have 4 different meal categories to choose from and each one of those has meals for you to pick. However, if you forget to pick your meals one week, don’t worry. Factor will send you a box based on your previous selections.

On the meal menu page, Factor also displays the Nutritional Information of the meal as well as all the ingredients that go into it. This is a nice bonus for picky eaters or people who generally want to know what they are about to eat. For example, I don’t like cilantro so any meals with those are an instant skip. With Trifecta, I will have to cross my fingers and hope they don’t send any meals with cilantro.

Here is what that experience looks like:

With Trifecta, that information isn’t as readily available. However, when selecting your meal plan you will be able to see the average macros that are in that meal plan. For example, here are the average macros for two different meal plans, Clean Eating and Keto:

While not as precise as the Factor, this does give you a good idea of what kind of meals you will receive and the macros of each.

Additionally, since you can’t pick your own meals and avoid specific ingredients you don’t like, Trifecta does have an option to not include meals that have some common ingredients. For the Clean Eating plan, you can exclude shellfish, salmon, white fish, nuts, chicken, red meat, mushrooms, and turkey.

I think this is a good middle ground between not being able to pick your meals but also being able to avoid meals you have no interest in eating.

Customer Service

Winner: Trifecta, by a hair

Both of these meal delivery services offer top of the line customer service from what I have experience.

They have robust options for self help such as the ability to pause deliveries for a set amount of time and the plans are all easy to cancel with no hoops to jump through.
Factor’s support team is available 7 days a week with phone and chat support being available Monday through Friday from 9am-9pm CT and on the weekends from 9am-6pm.

Trifecta also offers phone, chat, and email support throughout the week. The thing that separated Trifecta from Factor is the ability to schedule a consultation with a nutritional coach.

While both services give you an option to talk to a nutritional coach, I believe Factor is limited to a one time consultation while Trifecta’s coaches are available whenever you want to talk and need some guidance on reaching your fitness or weight loss goals. However, with this level of support does come a higher price tag.