Review: Factor Protein Plus Meals

The Protein Plus options are pretty broad, comprising about half of Factor’s menu items overall. The meals remain mostly stolidly middle American: garlic herb chicken, barbecue wings, a red pepper frittata for breakfast. Jamaican jerk salmon and a Thai yellow curry chicken were among the most peripatetic options I tried, but even these feel domesticated, accessibly tame. (I did in fact like the jerk salmon a lot more than I expected to.)

Most dishes, though, are classic square meals: a meat, a starch, a veggie that’s probably green. It’s almost wholesome, Midwestern mom food. Heck, Factor—founded and based in Illinois—even has a Midwesterner’s sense of improvised adventure: An “unstuffed pepper” is basically the rice and meat and tomato sauce you’d canonically stuff into a bell pepper, but delivered in saucy meatball form with bell pepper bits strewn amid the rice. It looked sloppy, and it tasted like pure distilled comfort. If you hate what’s essentially a peppery meatball stew, I don’t know you.

In bygone years, Factor was perhaps over-reliant on mashes and hashes to fill out meals, but these made only a few appearances—including an actually kinda tasty mashed potatoes with leeks, served as a gloppy side to a pleasantly thick slab of filet mignon that arrived medium-rare, and reheated up to more like medium.

The proteins, uniformly, came out tender and relatively juicy, whether chicken or shrimp or beef. Reheated veggies are always difficult to manage in terms of texture, and that was true here, too. In general, Factor’s veggies were likely to be a little soggy if you nuked them—and a lot better if you put them in an air fryer or convection oven. Also, steer toward meals with brown and wild rice over white or “risotto.”

Over the Long Haul

Photograph: Matthew Korfhage

I will always like fresh-cooked food better than meals that have been prepared and reheated from a box: The brightness of a fresh tomato, the pop of a pea, the lively crispness of a just-so carrot, are impossible to replicate in food made yesterday or last week. But proteins and stews fared pretty well in particular, and so the Protein Plus options amounted to my best experience with Factor. It was also among my favorite prepared meal services overall.