Painless Meal Prep Starts With the Right Containers | SELF

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Meal prepping can help you cut back on buying lunch at work or ordering takeout most nights. There’s more than one way to do it—you can stash exact portions of a home-cooked meal in your fridge or store individual ingredients until you’re ready to assemble your dish. But either way, you’ll need a sturdy set of meal prep containers to keep your food fresh until you’re ready to dig in.

We’ve tested some of the best meal prep containers out there—including ceramic storage sets, sleek salad bowls, and spacious lunch boxes. To stow away your leftovers, prepare your work lunches, and keep your fridge looking organized, you’re going to want to grab these for your kitchen.

Caraway

Amazon

Caraway

Since getting this set from Caraway, I am actively excited about storing my leftovers, packing my lunches, and making big batches of oatmeal for the week ahead. This bundle—which includes the five-piece Food Storage Set and the four-piece Mini Food Storage Set—comes with containers in almost any size you might need. I like to prep dinner ingredients ahead of time and assemble the final dishes night-of, and I always have a perfect container for every single component (even when I’m making something with a lot of mix-ins, like a Mexican or Greek bowl). I also love that the lids are clear, so I can see exactly what I’m reaching for in the fridge.

I got the Dot & Dash Containers as add-ons, and I highly recommend scooping these up too. They’re perfect for saving those little ingredients (think: scallions or parsley) that you’re often tempted to toss after a meal.

I also used these ceramic containers to bring my lunch to work—and that’s when I noticed how helpful the silicone straps are for making sure the airtight lids stay closed. The lids seem very secure, but it’s still nerve-racking to commute with a container full of spaghetti in tomato sauce, you know? The straps lock in place and give me that extra assurance that my lunch isn’t going to cause a scene on the subway.

I could go on and on about this set and all of the little details that make it feel so luxe—I haven’t even mentioned the included cabinet organizer!—but you just need to try them for yourself to understand. While they’re pricey, they’ll replace almost every other container in your pantry.

Product specs

Material: Ceramic-coated glass | Care instructions: Dishwasher-safe

W&P

Amazon

I’ve had this bowl for a few months, and not a week has gone by when I haven’t used it. Most often, I bring my pre-cooked breakfast oats in it to the office, but it has also come in clutch for soup. The bowl comes in 16- or 20-ounce sizes, and the smaller one is the perfect serving size for a hearty yogurt parfait or some leftover pasta. (It doesn’t take up too much room in my work bag, either.)

But my favorite feature is the silicone coating that makes it possible for me to grab the bowl straight from the microwave without scorching my hand. I didn’t realize how much having to deal with a scalding-hot glass container every day while heating up my oats annoyed me until I simply…didn’t have to anymore.

Product specs

Material: Glass, silicone | Care instructions: Dishwasher-safe

OXO

Amazon

OXO

Amazon

Between these two sets, one SELF tester outfitted her pantry with almost every kind of container she needed. The Prep & Go set has the 2 Cup Divided Container, which is perfect for storing some veggies and dip or yogurt and granola. The 6.3 Cup Container is ideal for pasta, a salad, a grain bowl, or whatever else you made for dinner last night. And one standout is the 1.9 Cup Container with Colander that’ll make sure your fruit stays dry instead of getting soggy.

“They’re sturdy and not too heavy—they all fit nicely in my lunchbox and have definitely made prepping office lunches easier,” our tester says. “I really like the container that’s split in half because it's perfect for packing chips and hummus or finishing up two types of leftovers at once (extra efficient!). And the condiment cups are a nice addition—they hold just enough salad dressing or dip for my lunches.”

The larger cylinders in Oxo’s Twist & Stack Set are exactly what you need to pack up a large batch of soup for a rainy day. And the smaller ones can be your go-tos for yogurt, smoothies, or homemade ice cream. “I love that all of the lids fit all of the containers interchangeably—I never have to dig for the right lid (so annoying),” our tester says. “They stack well and make my leftovers look so much more organized in my fridge!”

Product specs

Material: Plastic | Care instructions: Dishwasher-safe

Rubbermaid

Amazon

This is the set to go with if you’re cooking multiple meals at once or you have a big family to feed: It includes two of each container in six sizes, to give you plenty of options. (Bonus: Rubbermaid sells most of the sizes separately, so you can order more of the ones you use most if you need to.)

And the most important factor: They’ll keep your surfaces safe. “What I really like about these is the seal that you get with the click-top lid,” Cara Harbstreet, MS, RD, a registered dietitian based in Kansas City, previously told SELF. “It actually creates a little bit of a vacuum seal, which is spill-proof. I’ve never had a disaster where they leaked or broke open.”

Product specs

Material: Plastic | Care instructions: Dishwasher-safe

S'well

Amazon

S’well

Salads are a lunch classic for a reason: They require little-to-no cooking, don’t need to be heated up, and can easily be transformed with a few ingredient swaps. Bringing one with you on the regular is a whole lot easier with a bowl like this one—it has ample space for lettuce and all of your mix-ins.

“I love that it comes with a little dressing container and a stainless steel divider that prevents any spillage, even if I carry it around upside down or on its side,” one SELF tester says. The 64-ounce (also available in 184-ounce) bowl is a little large—our tester fit three to four servings of her favorite quinoa salad in it—so you’ll need to make some room in your fridge, but we think it’s worth it if salads are part of your regular rotation.

Product specs

Material: Stainless steel | Care instructions: Dishwasher-safe

Stasher

Stasher

Tired: Disposable, single-use plastic bags. Wired: Reusable silicone pouches. I’d never even heard of the latter until Stasher came on the scene—and they’re a true game-changer, according to our tester. “They’re high-quality silicone bags with a really secure seal,” she says. “The ‘pinch loc’ seal is very thick and easy to feel when it locks.”

You can use them to store ingredients (even liquid ones!) or prep your lunch for the next day. This pack comes with seven pouches ranging from itty bitty snack-sized–our tester fit 12 chopped carrot sticks in it—to a half-gallon freezer bag that can hold a large sandwich or lots of popcorn.

These bags probably won’t replace your glass or plastic containers, but they’re great for your kitchen if you want to cut back on single-use plastic in the meal prep process.

Product specs

Material: Silicone | Care instructions: Dishwasher-safe

Hydroflask

Amazon

If you want something that can keep your soup hot or your overnight oats cold, look no further than this Hydroflask jar. One SELF editor found that it kept her bites at the perfect temperature for two to three hours, “though you could probably heat the food up very hot before you leave in the morning, put it into the container, and it would still be warm enough by lunchtime,” she says.

She’s also impressed—but not surprised, as a Hydroflask loyalist—by how durable the jar is: “It seals really tightly, so I wasn't afraid about anything leaking. You really can throw this thing around full of food and liquid, and not worry at all about it.”

More good news: “Another thing I love is that the jar doesn't retain the taste of whatever food was in it,” our tester says. “Food storage containers made of other materials, like plastic and even some metal ones, can end up smelling or tasting weird after they've had food sitting in them for a while.”

Product specs

Material: Stainless steel | Care instructions: Dishwasher-safe

Bentgo

Bentgo

Do your lunches tend to involve sides, snacks, and maybe a sweet treat? This lunch box is a far cry from the brown bag you might’ve carried as a kid—it has a large section for the main part of your meal and a few smaller ones for your Very Adult Snacks.

The best feature of this lunch box has to be that it’s customizable: “The removable barriers made it easy to tailor the compartments to my preferred serving size, rather than the other way around,” our tester says.

Product specs

Material: Plastic | Care instructions: Dishwasher-safe

After trying a bunch of options for weeks, these are the features we think are most important:

Size

The sizes of containers you’ll need will depend on how you cook: Setting aside multiple servings of the same meal? You probably need a few medium containers. Do you tend to prepare ingredients for one meal at a time? You might like some smaller options instead.

Material

We tested glass, plastic, and stainless steel containers—and they all have their perks.

Honestly, it’s not a bad idea to stock up on containers made from a few different materials to fit all of your meal prepping needs.

Care instructions

Before you add a set of containers to your cart, we recommend checking out the manufacturer’s care instructions. Along with looking for labels such as refrigerator-, freezer-, oven-, and microwave-safe, find out whether they’re dishwasher-safe or need to be hand washed only. If you’re less likely to use one set because you can’t toss it in your dishwasher after, then you should probably skip it.

For several weeks, we used these containers to organize ingredients in our refrigerators, store leftovers, and pack office breakfasts and lunches. (We’re in the office four days a week, so these were in heavy rotation.)

We also followed the instructions to clean each container properly—most are dishwasher-safe, but we also hand-washed some. During the testing process, we took notes on where they excelled or fell flat. But honestly, all of the options on this list became staples in our kitchens.

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