Delicious frozen smoothies straight from your freezer

Frozen Garden isn’t meant to be your primary meal delivery service, but its specialty smoothies are tasty breakfast, lunch, or dinner supplements.

The name Frozen Garden inspires thoughts of ice-cold treats, so it's no surprise this meal-kit delivery service has a particular specialty. Frozen Garden exclusively focuses on smoothies, drinks, and other largely liquid snacks. This makes it more of a supplemental service unlike Fresh N Lean, an Editors' Choice pick that supplies enough food to replace your meals. Still, Frozen Garden’s frosty delights don't disappoint.

Frozen Garden requires no subscription; you can buy a la carte boxes. However, you must place an order that's at least $35. If you plan to frequently order, you can opt for a convenient and slightly less expensive subscription, but it’s not necessary. Subscriptions feature a 5 percent discount, including orders at the $35 minimum.

With only a handful of product categories, Frozen Garden’s pricing is pretty simple to break down. Smoothies cost $7.49 each, or $99.99 for a 14-smoothie variety pack. A bag of Fusion beverage enhancers costs $6.49, or $30.99 for a 5-bag variety pack. Oatmeal pouches and Delite desserts also cost $6.49 each, whereas a one-off add-on like one bundle of raw honey sticks costs $3.99.

A $35 box includes a nice variety at a reasonable price. Some may find $7.49 pricey for a drink, but my brain is so warped from years of living in the trendy food paradise that is New York City that I’m not sure if that’s a good deal or not.

However, depending on where you live, the shipping fees can add up. Frozen Garden delivers nationwide except for Alaska and Hawaii, a common limitation, but the farther away you are from the company’s Midwest headquarters, the greater the shipping costs. Michigan, Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio residents only pay $10 for shipping, but New Yorkers pay $15 while California residents pay $19. Orders above $150 get free shipping, but that’s a big smoothie commitment.

Though it only has four product categories, Frozen Garden features surprising variety within its organic menu. Each listing includes nutritional information, and everything I saw hovered between 100 and 200 calories. You can also filter searches and read customer reviews to help inform your purchases.

Smoothies are the flagship offering, with everything from green veggie smoothies to fruit smoothies to keto smoothies to seasonal smoothies. You select an entry to see its lengthy list of natural ingredients. Mocha Mint packs in coconut milk, green spinach, raw cacao and espresso, sweet banana, and peppermint. Meanwhile, Berrikini features cauliflower, zucchini, berries, pomegranate seeds, and flax.

The other options don’t have quite as much as going for them, but it’s still nice to see other menu items. Oatmeal, including Blueberry Hemp and Pear Apricot, makes Frozen Garden a potential breakfast pick similar to Splendid Spoon. Delites are creamy “guilt-free” desserts with flavors like Ginger Snap and Pumpkin Pie. If you don’t like paying so much money for a single drink, Fusion beverage enhancers give you a dozen or so cubes to flavor multiple glasses of water with pineapple and lemon, raspberry and mango, or other ingredients.

Frozen Garden isn’t all smoothies, but nothing it offers is a replacement for an actual meal. This is my opinion, but I don’t think the company would claim otherwise. Daily Harvest has plant-based smoothies, too, but it also has meals that satisfy you in their own right. Ramen Hero is similarly narrow in its focus, but a big ramen bowl totally counts as dinner. I mostly enjoyed Frozen Garden as a treat alongside the more substantial meal kits I simultaneously tested.

I received a wide array of Frozen Garden test samples yet the box was light. Dry ice kept the contents cold before I transferred them to the freezer, where they can last for about a year. The packaging is recyclable, from the cardboard box to the containers for the smoothie ingredients. Frozen Garden boasts about its sustainability and dedication to local farmers.  

Preparing a Frozen Garden smoothie is quick and easy. It’s basically a prepared meal kit. All that you need is a blender and about a cup of whatever liquid you want, whether it’s water, milk, or a milk alternative. A line on the packaging shows you how much liquid to add. You don’t need ice, since the smoothie contents are already frozen. If anything, I used warm water to help everything melt and come together faster. Blend for about a minute and enjoy 16 colorful ounces to sip.

Frozen Garden’s smoothies have a lot to live up to considering they serve as the service’s backbone. Fortunately, I was quite impressed. With so many ingredients, smoothies tasted pleasingly complex and well-considered rather than random. Even with so much packed in, key flavors shine through. The Immunity Green smoothie (which we could all use right now) has everything from cayenne to avocado to apples, but it largely tasted like a fancy lemonade or a virgin cocktail. Meanwhile, the Green Protein smoothie reminded me of the holiday season with its array of festive spices.

The other menu items were interesting, but not quite as successful. The Pumpkin Pie Delite dessert tasted just like what it said on the box, and had a mellow, porridge-like consistency. Still, I would’ve preferred it warm, which kind of goes against the whole Frozen Garden thing. The oatmeal is called “Overnight Oats,” because you’re supposed to fill the bag with liquid, and then let it sit overnight. Apparently, this helps preserve nutrients otherwise destroyed by heating, but my partner and I didn’t feel this was worth the extra prep and effort compared to instant oatmeal. It took us a few tries to get the liquid ratio right so that the oats weren't too runny (you really shouldn't go over the suggested liquid line). Finally, I felt the Fusion beverage enhancers, despite being meant to flavor water, were too mild. I had to drop in a handful of ginger lemon pineapple cubes to really taste anything, but doing that made the drink too pulpy. 

If you’re a smoothie fanatic, give Frozen Garden a shot. Buy a big enough box to avoid shipping fees, and stock up your freezer for whenever you next need a nifty and nutritious refreshment. Just be aware that smoothies, a side beverage, are the star of the show. Everything else was a bit hit or miss. For heartier meal-kit delivery service, consider our other Editors’ Choice picks. Blue Apron can teach you to cook, Green Chef provides excellent vegetarian meals, HelloFresh serves all diets, Hungryroot has flexible grocery options, and MisenBox connects you with local restaurants. 

Frozen Garden isn’t meant to be your primary meal delivery service, but its specialty smoothies are tasty breakfast, lunch, or dinner supplements.

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Jordan Minor is an Analyst on PCMag’s Apps and Gaming team, and he really just wants to use his fancy Northwestern University journalism degree to write about video games. Beyond gaming, Jordan covers coding software, dating apps, meal kits, video streaming services, website builders, and other software-related beats. He also hosts The Pop-Off, PCMag's video game show.

Jordan was previously the senior editor for Geek.com, and a PCMag intern before that. He has also written for Kotaku, The A.V. Club, and Paste Magazine, and is currently working on a book about the history of video games. He is the reason everything you think you know about Street Sharks is a lie.

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