Marley Spoon Review: A Meal Kit for People Who Actually Like to Cook

The first thing to know about Marley Spoon is that it has Martha Stewart’s stamp of approval—the whole thing is built around her most popular recipes. So 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.

Marley Spoon

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Marley Spoon

We’ve tried lots of meal kit delivery services over the last several years and, honestly, they’re 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 has the pedigree, online popularity, and over a decade under its belt: Would it live up to the sum of its parts? We gave quote, unquote Martha Stewart’s meal kit a thorough test to see how it stacks up against its competitors.

When you click to sign up, Marley Spoon asks you to select the type of meals you want (from a number of dietary preferences), how many people you want to feed, and how many meals you want. 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.

You then answer a brief questionnaire to better inform the recipes that will auto-populate in your first box. 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 & Easy, and Picky Eater Approved. I went with the filter-free Everyday Variety meal option to get a sense of the range of selections available.

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 laid in the box 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 extra trash. 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 that have an image of the meal on one side and the instructions on the back, as well as a little card with a QR code that lets you check when your box was packed, if for any reason you’re feeling unsure of how long it’s been sitting around.

It’s not uncommon for a meal kit’s produce to be a little worse for wear by the time it gets to you. Not so with Marley Spoon’s: When commerce writer Alaina Chou spent several weeks testing the brand, she noted how high-quality the vegetables were in each of her shipments. “The herbs were fresh and never wilted, cucumbers were crunchy and unblemished, and citrus was juicy, not shriveled,” she says.

As for the proteins, Marley Spoon states that its chicken is NAE (No Antibiotics Ever), while other meats “do not contain any antibiotics at the time of harvest but could have received antibiotics at some point during their life.” In general, Alaina found the steak, chicken, and seafood she tried to be on par with what she typically picks up from her local grocery store.

As meal kit dishes go, the cilantro-lime cauliflower rice bowl with beef turned out to be quite pretty.

Wilder Davies

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 required. Marley Spoon, however, is designed for people who are willing to roll up their sleeves. 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.

All of the 20 Marley Spoon recipes I prepared 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. Alaina’s favorites included the masala-spiced pork kebabs with cauliflower rice and cilantro and the chicken parm meatballs, the latter of which came together in a single skillet and made for an excellent work-from-home lunch.

What surprised me was that cooking with Marley Spoon taught me 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, mashing 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.

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.

Given the prep-work-heavy nature of this particular meal kit, the meals themselves are more time-consuming than some of the others we’ve tried. I’m not talking anything crazy here, but expect to set aside 30–40 minutes for most of the recipes (with the exception of the ones labeled “Express Recipe!” or “Under 30 Minutes”).

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.

Marley Spoon is a 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.

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