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Every meal delivery service tries to find something that will make it unique. For Marley Spoon it is its relationship with Martha Stewart. I won’t go so far as to call it Martha Stewart’s meal kit, but the whole thing is built around her most popular recipes. While you might not be able to have Martha herself come to your home and prepare you dinner throughout the week (she’s busy), you can have a box of fresh ingredients shipped to your door filled with almost everything you need to make a bunch of her best dishes yourself. We’ve tried lots of meal kit delivery services over the last several years and they are all over the map in terms of quality. But some of these companies (like Hungryroot, Cook Unity, or Blue Apron for example) have started to figure out what works and what doesn’t and continue to improve their services. Marley Spoon, one of the more well-regarded meal kits online, also has a few years under its belt at this point, so we thought it would be worth giving the kit a thorough test to see how it fared in comparison to its competitors. Here’s my Marley Spoon review.
Ordering
The first thing Marley Spoon has you do is choose your order frequency. You can get anywhere from two to six meals a week of either two or four portions per meal. I chose to do four portions—theoretically a family-friendly plan—to have enough to feed my roommate and have lunch the next day. Before you pick your first box, Marley Spoon gives you a brief questionnaire to better inform the recipes it will automatically pick for you. However, you’re allowed to swap out and customize the selections to your liking. Preference options include ones for people with particular dietary needs—gluten-free, keto, or vegetarian options, for example—as well as more general filters like low-calorie, low-carb, quick-and-easy, and picky eater approved. I went with the filter-free “everyday variety” meal option to get a broad sense of the selections. In addition to the Marley Spoon meal kits, the company has a pretty expansive menu of add-ons that include premade desserts and shakes, as well as things you might otherwise get at the grocery store like meats, produce, cheeses, and bread products. You can add any and all of them to your weekly meal kit order.
On delivery day, everything arrived surrounded by an ample number of ice packs, and nothing seemed too warm or wilted despite the record-breaking summer heat in my area and that the box sat outside for a couple hours before I got home. Upon opening the package I was pleased to discover that most of the veggies were in there without any additional packaging. Some meal kits (Home Chef, for example) can overdo it with plastic packaging on almost every individual ingredient, so I appreciated the attempt to minimize that. I should note that there were still plenty of individual packets of spices, condiments, and plastic containers for delicate herbs, lettuces, and meats, though. Marley Spoon is better than most, but as a rule, if you’re seriously focused on sustainability in every lifestyle choice, meal kits aren’t gonna win you over.
The box also comes with full page recipe cards with an image of the recipe on one side and the instructions on the back, as well as a little card with a little sticker-sensor that lets you check how fresh your box is through a QR code, if for any reason you’re feeling unsure of how long your box has been sitting around.
The Experience
Some meal kits give more of an illusion of cooking, with lots of preportioned ingredients and very little in the way of prep work or technique. Marley Spoon is not one of them. It is designed for people who are at least interested in meal prep themselves. You will be pan-searing meats, chopping vegetables, deglazing pans, and so on. If you’re an experienced cook, none of it will seem that difficult, but if your current meal planning revolves primarily around bags of Trader Joe’s frozen gnocchi, you might find the Marley Spoon meals present a modest challenge.
Out of the 20 Marley Spoon meals I prepared, each one felt like a complete, home-cooked meal. Most of them followed the same formula: a main protein anchored by vegetables and greens with the occasional addition of a carbohydrate. Except for the few pasta dishes on the menu, breads and starches keep a pretty low profile at Marley Spoon. Overall, though, everything I made seemed well-rounded and well-conceived.
Some of the best meals from the weekly menus included the chicken piccata meatballs with cauliflower mash, which was savory, lemony and surprisingly filling; the Mexican street corn chicken salad, a sort of dressed up esquites; and the chicken with lemon butter and cauliflower rice, which was brothy and warm.
What surprised me was that cooking with Marley Spoon offers a few tricks that I plan on incorporating into my regular cooking repertoire. Cooking cauliflower rice under an oven broiler? Much easier than doing it in a pan. Also, the mashed cauliflower with mascarpone (Martha really knows how to romance a cauliflower). The recipes were full of speedy, clever little cooking tricks, which can carry over to the cooking you do beyond the Marley Spoon box.
What I didn’t like about Marley Spoon
My gripes with Marley Spoon are each small. The instructions in the recipes sometimes read convoluted. Marley Spoon says it caps every recipe at six steps, but that’s a bit of a gimmick because some of those steps have several sub-steps that might be a little confusing to greener cooks. For example, cues to set aside certain portions of prepped ingredients can get lost in the block of text. I found myself doing a lot of rereading to make sure I added a particular portion of lemon juice in step two, while reserving more for step four later
Also, Marley Spoon does require you to have a few ingredients on hand. Primarily olive oil, butter, eggs, and vinegar. They give you plenty of warning via email ahead of time to let you know what to stock, but this could be annoying for people who want their meal kit to include absolutely everything they need.
Finally, my roommate and I found the portion sizes inconsistent, tending toward a little too small. I’d hesitate to call it truly family- or kid-friendly, not because of the ingredients or flavors, but because I can’t see the four-serving box being enough food for a household of four in which people routinely go in for seconds.
Is Marley Spoon worth it?
Marley Spoon is the type of meal kit for people who genuinely like to cook, but don’t have the time or energy for involved meal planning or lengthy grocery shopping trips. While some recipes were stronger than others, they all produced comforting and delicious meals that took very little time to pull together. Even on my busiest weeknights, I had time to whip up a Marley Spoon meal.