Before you grab those pre-made grocery store meals, you might want to consider
what’s really in them. They may be convenient for people short on time,
but they can also hide some unpleasant surprises.
According to a Consumer Reports study published in 2016, only about half of
the pre-made meals you'll find in grocery stores are prepared on the premises. Those
that aren't were cooked somewhere else before being packed, refrigerated, transported,
unpacked, and re-refrigerated before they get into your hands. In fact, some may even
have been frozen in the process and thawed or reheated upon arrival at your local grocer.
Moreover, some of the ingredients used in making the pre-made grocery store meals have come to the
kitchen in pre-made form themselves, and sometimes preserved in cans or bottles. Further, some of
the ingredients may have been frozen before they were used to make the pre-made grocery store meal.
Not that any of this is exactly bad - it's just that if you're avoiding preservatives,
then pre-made grocery store meals may not be the answer. In addition, you may want to think twice
about eating the leftovers. If you do, you'll need to reheat them thoroughly to 165 degrees
Fahrenheit, according to the USDA. But keep in mind that this is now the second time you'll
be reheating the food, which was cooked for the first time before it came to you.
Federal law requires most packaged foods you can buy in grocery stores be labeled
with a statement as to the presence of one or more of the nine major food allergens: Milk,
egg, fish, shellfish, tree nuts, peanuts, wheat, soybeans, and sesame. Most pre-made
grocery store food is labeled appropriately in that respect. However, mistakes do happen.
Of course, some people have allergies to foods other than the usual suspects. In fact,
more than 170 different foods are associated with allergic reactions in humans, according to
Food Allergy Research and Education. Although most involve those nine major food allergens,
some 10% of the 32 million people in the U.S. with food allergies are sensitive to foods that
are not. Although no disclosure statement needs to be made about these other potential allergens,
they should appear on the ingredient label. Unfortunately, federal law doesn't always
require an ingredients list on pre-made food, and some states don't either.
Because ingredient labels are not federally mandated, they're also not overseen,
which makes them more apt to contain errors, omissions, and inaccuracies. Some errors and
omissions may cause allergic reactions. Others, such as undisclosed calories,
salt, or saturated fat, may pose a less immediate risk but may be problematic for some nevertheless.
"Without a nutrition label you'd never know that this 6
ounce piece of tilapia has 19 grams of fat."
As much as many of us would rather not admit to ourselves, calories matter. What goes in must be
used for energy, or it's stored as fat. The FDA Labeling Guide provides a rubric for retailers
to disclose the calories in pre-made foods. But knowing how many calories are in a package
of pre-made food is one thing. Understanding the number of calories per serving is quite another,
and requires, at a minimum, an understanding of what constitutes a serving size. Unfortunately,
that's somewhat open to interpretation,
especially when it comes to pre-made meals like those you'll find in the grocery store
What you'll tend to find, according to Kacie Vavrek, a registered dietitian nutritionist
writing for Ohio State University, is that when portion sizes are given at all,
they tend to be very, very tiny — much tinier than you'll find in
your average restaurant or on your average at-home dinner table. As Vavrek explained,
"You could end up eating double or triple that amount if you consume more than the
recommended serving size on the nutrition label."
Of course, that's no different from how things tend to shake up, calorie-wise,
when your meal is delivered to you by a server at a restaurant.
In addition to salt, pre-made supermarket meals tend to be high also in saturated fat,
according to findings in the 2015 study published in the journal,
Appetite. Sources of saturated fat, which you'll recognize by its solid state at room temperature,
include butter, cheese, red meat, poultry, lamb, and pork — all of which are used quite
often as ingredients in pre-made meals from the grocery store and elsewhere.
Along with trans fat, saturated fat is one of the types of fats that scientists,
including cardiologists, would rather you strictly limit. Habitual consumption of more
than the recommended allowance can cause blood levels of LDL cholesterol to rise, which can,
in turn, increase your risk of heart disease and stroke. The American Heart Association recommends
that adults limit their daily consumption of saturated fat to the equivalent of 5% to 6%
of their total calories. In other words, for every 1,000 calories consumed, no more than 60
should come from saturated fat. That's the caloric equivalent of around half a tablespoon of butter.
For an adult consuming 2,000 calories per day, that translates to about 12 to 13 grams of
saturated fat per day. And those grams add up perhaps more quickly than you'd like when the
average pre-made meal analyzed by the researchers in the 2015 study was 7.2 grams per serving,
And remember, per serving doesn't usually translate to what most of
us would consider a single portion, so we're likely consuming even more.
Pre-made meals from the grocery store may also harbor contaminants. One such
type of contaminant is bacteria — the kind that causes foodborne illness,
such as any of the potentially life-threatening illnesses caused by salmonella, E coli,
or Listeria bacteria. Pre-made meals present a heightened risk of what's
known as cross-contamination because meals tend to involve a variety of foods,
not all of which are cooked at temperatures high enough to kill foodborne bacteria
For example, if a dish is made with chicken and carrots, and the cook uses the same knife
to cut both, the carrots can be contaminated with whatever bacteria is on the chicken. Most likely,
the chicken will be cooked to the critical temperature whereas the
carrots may not be. Recalls of pre-made foods due to actual or suspected bacterial
contamination are a lot more common than any of us would care to think.
"Hundreds of convenience food products are being recalled due to possible listeria contamination."
Cross-contamination can also introduce trace amounts of undeclared allergens
into pre-made food. Concerns over accidental allergen exposure in
ready-to-eat products led the FDA to issue a warning to Whole Foods in 2020.
According to researchers out of the U.K., pre-made meals tend to be low in sugar.
Moreover, most of the nutrients that the researchers were looking for varied in
amount depending upon the price of the meal, but sugar was one of the two that did not,
with the other being fiber. And just to be clear, all of the meals that were analyzed
were considered savory, as opposed to sweet, in terms of their flavor profile.
The average number of grams of sugar contained in the 166 analyzed meals
was 8. Just to give that a bit of context, other foods that have about
eight grams of sugar per serving include a two-tablespoon serving of barbecue sauce,
a half-cup serving of soda and a single three-square serving of British milk chocolate.
That's about one-third of the sugar the American Heart Association recommends women consume
daily and about one-fifth of the sugar the AHA recommends for men. So, no, that 8-gram average
isn't exactly high, but it's something to bear in mind when you're looking for a savory meal.
For better or for worse, the chefs charged with designing the recipes
for your pre-made grocery store meals, not to mention the cooks charged with preparing them,
know that salt makes food taste better. In fact, there's a tendency for pre-made foods
to be prepared with generous amounts of salt, and likely more than you'd cook with yourself.
For healthy adults, the American Heart Association recommends that people consume
no more than 2,300 mg of sodium per day but suggests a more ideal number to strive for
is 1,500. That can be challenging when your pre-made entree contains over 900
milligrams of sodium per serving, as Consumer Reports noted for some products in a report.
"This is, you know, two-thirds of our sodium for the whole day."
Further, it's not always going to be clear how many servings you're getting in your package,
and it's likely your idea of a serving is bigger than your vendor's. A 2015 study
published in Appetite analyzed 166 pre-made meals from 41 stores, and concluded that all
of the meals tended to be high in salt, and that included some portions of the meals labeled as
"healthier" selections. When considering whether to cook at home or pick up a pre-made meal,
remember that it's easier to control the amount of sodium you consume at home.
If the salt and saturated fat content in the average pre-made grocery store meals have you
feeling concerned, let's not forget that in addition to the many options available for
home-delivery of healthy pre-made meals, your local supermarket may stock some pre-made meal
options that are labeled as "healthy" or "healthier" as well. The caveat,
however, is that you still should read the label to determine whether
any given meal's idea of health is in line with your personal definition.
For context, the FDA allows a "healthy" label only on pre-made meals that have less than five grams
of fat and two grams of saturated fat per 100 grams, less than 600 mg of salt and less than
95 mg of cholesterol. Many pre-made grocery store meals analyzed by the researchers for the 2015
study contained well over those amounts, including a number that were labeled as "healthier."
The takeaway here is that you should trust but verify "healthy" claims on
pre-made grocery store meals. And one of the things you should verify is whether the
actual numbers on the label are consistent with your own dietary needs and goals.
Pre-made meals don't just save you time on prepping and cooking - they also offer the
convenience of going from refrigerator to microwave to table without dirtying
so much as a single plate. But if your pre-made meal comes in a plastic container,
you may want to consider that according to the World Health Organization,
microwaving food in plastic containers may cause chemicals from the plastic to leach into the food.
Even a container labeled as "microwave safe" isn't immune, as that designation means only
that the plastic won't melt while it's cooking your food. That doesn't mean it won't leach.
The question becomes whether your health can be harmed by consuming
foods into which plastic chemicals have leached. As Laura Vandenberg,
a professor of environmental health science at U. Mass-Amherst, told Men's Health,
the chemicals that have raised the most concerns are bisphenol A, also known as BPA,
and phthalates, both of which are sometimes found in food that's been cooked or heated in plastic.
"FDA research shows toxins can be released into your food from non-BPA free containers."
However, the FDA also takes the position that the low levels found in foods cooked in plastic do not
raise significant health concerns, but you may or may not feel comfortable relying on that when it's
your and your family's health at stake. That's why Vandenberg recommends taking that extra step of
removing your ready-made meal from its plastic packaging before heating it in the microwave.
All things considered, it's perfectly reasonable to still make pre-made meals
part of your weekly at-home dining routine — well,
with one possible exception. To put it mildly, ready-made meals will cost you.
In 2016, Consumer Reports compared the cost of buying a pre-made meal from the grocery
store versus picking up the ingredients and making it yourself, from scratch,
at home. And that comparison reflected rather poorly on pre-made meals, which cost,
on average, twice as much as making the same dish yourself.
So, clearly, you can save money by making it yourself even when using pre-made components
to make life easier. And if you have the right recipe, you can cut your time down to
under 10 minutes. But for some of us, when it comes to pre-made grocery store meals,
the convenience of not having to wash a single dish is priceless.