Beachbody portion control containers review: the 7-piece kit, fifteen years on

The verdict in one paragraph

This kit has outlived the workout program it was designed to sell, and the reason is unglamorous: filling a container is faster than weighing, and a tired person will actually do it. Seven plastic cups, five food groups, one stack in a cabinet. What it is not is a meal prep container — nothing on the maker's page claims a seal for transport, and the lids are the kind that keep a fridge tidy rather than keep dressing off your bag. Buy it as the measuring step in front of your real containers, not as the containers.

What is actually in the box

BODi publishes the contents as food groups, not volumes. Verbatim, the set is "1 Green container – Veggies", "1 Purple container – Fruits", "1 Red container – Proteins", "1 Yellow container – Carbs", "1 Blue container – Healthy Fats" and "2 Orange containers – Seeds & Dressings". The two orange containers are the detail people miss: dressings and seeds are the two things most likely to be eaten at the same meal, so you get a spare.

The material and care wording is short and worth reading before you buy: "BPA-free, DEHP-free" and "Top-rack dishwasher safe and microwave safe". Note the qualifier — top-rack. A heating element under a thin polypropylene cup is how a portion container becomes an oval. The page also states that the containers "nest inside each other for convenient, space-saving storage" and that "Stickers [are] included to label each of your containers", which exists because the colors are meaningless once the plan is in your head and the stickers are what stop a housemate from using the red one for olive oil.

The lid-fits rule is the whole system

The single most useful line BODi has ever written about these containers is in its own container guide: "As long as the lid fits, it counts." That sentence does two things. It tells you the portion is defined by a closed container rather than a level scoop, so you are allowed to mound food above the rim and press the lid on. And it tells you what the kit is really measuring: a compressible volume, not a weight.

In practice that is a feature. Shredded chicken, chopped peppers and cooked rice all behave differently in a measuring cup, and arguing with each of them every evening is how people quit portioning altogether. The rule removes the argument. It is also the reason the kit is approximate by design, which matters when you get to the comparison with a scale further down.

One honest caveat about that guide page: as of this review it describes the colors and the food groups but no longer prints the cup capacities it once did. If you want the numbers, we keep them with the rest of the arithmetic on portion control container sizes explained.

The capacities are not on the product page

This is the most common complaint about buying the kit today, and it is justified: you cannot read the volumes off the listing. The figures below are the ones BODi has published in its own container explainer, and they are the only reason the kit is useful without the program it was sold with.

Food groups are BODi's wording from the product page. Capacities are the figures published in the maker's container guide; the product listing itself prints none of them.

Add it up and the kit tops out at about 4⅙ cups across six distinct sizes. That is a meal, not a day, and not a batch — the kit measures what goes onto a plate or into a container, then goes back in the cabinet.

Three limits nobody mentions

1. The lids are not a seal. BODi makes no leak-proof or airtight claim anywhere on the listing, and the lids behave accordingly: fine for a covered cup of chopped peppers in the fridge, wrong for a bag. If a container with dressing in it is going to be carried anywhere, it needs a latch or a thread. The field that will actually claim it is on best leak-proof meal prep containers.

2. Seven cups is seven more things to wash. This is the real cost of a portion kit and the reason most people drift back to a scale eventually: a full day of color-coded eating generates ten or twelve small items, all top-rack only, all in the way of the dishes you actually ate from. The workaround that keeps the kit in use is to portion into your prep containers once a week rather than at every meal — fill the yellow four times on Sunday, not once a night.

3. The color system belongs to one program. Green, purple, red, yellow, blue, orange is a food-group map from 21 Day Fix. Nothing stops you using the containers as plain measures, and the capacities above are all you need to do it — but if you are not following a container-count plan, you are buying six measuring cups with lids, and you should price it that way.

Kit or scale, honestly

A cup is a volume and a gram is a mass, and the gap between them is bigger than people expect. Cut a chicken breast into cubes rather than shredding it and the same ¾-cup red container holds a different amount of protein. Pack the green one or drop the broccoli in loose and the difference is a visible fraction. Nobody is claiming that is fatal — it is the same error every day, which is exactly what makes a kit work for weight management — but it is not tracking.

So the split is clean. If your goal is consistency, the kit wins on speed and you will keep using it. If your goal is a macro target in grams, buy the scale: a 1 g resolution, 11 lb capacity scale costs about what the kit does and ends the argument. The reasoning in full, with the places a cup genuinely is good enough, is on how accurate are food scales and is a food scale worth it.

There is a third option people arrive at on their own: a divided tray with cup marks pressed into the plastic, so the container you carry is also the measure. It is less precise than either of the above and faster than both.

Who should buy something else

1. You want the portion to travel. Buy the divided tray instead — Bentgo Prep trays carry embossed cup marks and a lid designed for a bag, and the whole divided-tray field is ranked on best 3-compartment meal prep containers.
2. You track macros. Buy a scale. The pick and the runners-up are on best food scale for macros, and the method — weigh raw or cooked, tare the container, log once — is on how to use a food scale for macros.
3. You portion for the freezer. Seven cups with press-on lids are the wrong tool for forty frozen portions. A silicone tray with half-cup and one-cup fill lines does that job and gives the tray back: best freezer containers for meal prep.

There is one group the kit serves better than its marketing suggests: people eating a quarter-cup meal six times a day after bariatric surgery, for whom the yellow, blue and orange containers are the right volumes and everything else in a normal container set is far too big. The sealed vessels that pair with them are on best bariatric portion control containers.

And if you simply want to see this kit ranked against the alternatives rather than reviewed on its own, that page is best portion control containers.