Review: Marley Spoon Meal Kit

Marley Spoon is famously the Martha Stewart meal kit. Though founded in Germany, Marley Spoon hit up America's high queen of home economics when it arrived on American shores a decade back. Stewart lent the meal kit brand her cooking techniques, her general style, and her good name.

Among the many meal kits I've tested, Marley Spoon became synonymous with that Martha vibe. It wasn't flashy. There were fewer pan-continental culinary experiments. But the cooking was excellent. It was a good thing.

Well, things also change. Starting in December, a rebrand and website refresh has deprioritized Stewart and removed her picture on the front page of website, though the “Martha’s Best” imprimatur remains on a number of recipes. Reached by telephone after this review was first published, Marley Spoon marketing director Carrie King confirmed the partnership with Martha Stewart was very much ongoing, and the Martha’s Best recipes will stay.

Marley Spoon's brand is the meal kit for people who love good cooking and know what it tastes like—that's sorta what Martha Stewart was meant to represent. Meals I tested last year often took longer than some other meal kits. But they also tasted better and used better cooking techniques. This bucked the recent trend toward low-prep and no-prep meals.

Over the past year or more, Marley seems to have stopped bucking and also added a new wealth of international fare, from Moroccan tagine to Korean bibimbap. The meal kit also has a number of dishes with shorter prep times I didn't see as much when first testing the kit. These 15-minute express meals cut down on both ingredients and cooking steps. The site also has a number of ready-to-heat meals, plus market add-ons like salads.

It looked to me like Marley was veering away from its historic strengths and aiming for ease. Marley Spoon rep King says that while Marley Spoon has diversified on multiple fronts over time, including international meals and variety of cook times. But she also notes that my perception of a shift in emphasis may be a happy consequence of a website redesign, which made these options more visible and accessible.

One thing is true, however. As other meal kits have raised their prices in recent months, Marley Spoon has declined to do so. At $9 to $13 a portion, Marley Spoon is now among the lower-cost “premium” kits on midsize and larger orders. By contrast, competitor HelloFresh clocks in at $12 a portion across the board.

After testing a variety of international and fast-prep meals, alongside classics, it's impressive how much Marley Spoon has expanded the breadth of its options over the past year. But this did not come in all cases without cost to technique and flavor.

Matters of Convenience

Photograph: Matthew Korfhage

First, the good news. Ordering meal kit delivery on Marley Spoon is easier and more varied in options than it ever was.

Marley is now among the most varied meal kits. There are nearly 100 recipes, and around 50 ready-to-heat prepared meals. Your order can be a mix of each, though prepared meals come by default in multiples of two. Most of the meal kit recipes can be customized to swap in different proteins, such as Impossible beef on a chow fun, making vegetarian options more expansive.

You can choose two to six recipes a week to serve two, four, or six people. The more you order, the less expensive each meal will be. Shipping will likely be waived for your introductory box, but it’s otherwise $11 per week.

The ordering window is relatively rigid, however. Once you sign up for a meal plan, there will be a minimum of six days until you receive your order. If your box generally arrives on Tuesday, you'll be charged for next week's box at midnight on Tuesday. Which is to say, if you plan to pause or cancel, plan ahead.

Photograph: Matthew Korfhage

But if ordering is straightforward, the box when it arrives is far less organized than some other top-line kits, which tend to package each meal separately in little bags. Marley's ingredients arrive much like they would from a grocery store, with veggies on top and meat on the bottom, near the ice pack.

This cuts down a little on packaging waste, but it means a lot of foraging through your box if you order four or more recipes. You might devote significant work to hunting down faint and tiny print on tiny packages, wondering whether you're looking at chopped figs, currants, or dates. The same goes for individually packed herbs or multiples of greens. You may also end up wondering how many soy sauce or tamari packets, or cloves of garlic, were meant to go with each recipe.

The packets also aren't made for easy opening, which means you'll be making ample use of scissors or knives, over and over, for each ingredient. Other meal kits I've tried make this easier. This lack of logistics and packing likely does help keep Marley's costs low on large orders, while other meal kits have raised their prices. But you'll notice the inconvenience.

The New Cosmopolitanism

Photograph: Matthew Korfhage

A bright point on Marley's updated menu is an expanded devotion to international cuisine.

The best-designed recipes offered by Marley Spoon were almost always the ones that said “Martha's Best” on them. These are mostly classic-feeling Old World or New American recipes, like a creamy mushroom chicken with a dijon-paprika pan sauce that felt passed down from a Hungarian grandmother.

These old-school recipes are long on good technique and good advice. To me, they formed the core of what made the meal kit so good. Marley meant reductions, pan sauces, and deglazing. It meant timing ingredients appropriately. That classic European-influenced fare, I wrote last year, was “delicious in a way that reminded me of the generation of foods I’d grown up with: gentle, rich, tangy, earthy, yet no spicier than ripe garlic.”

The new menu still contains those classics, including seared duck or beef ravioli. But these have increasingly been augmented with a new and welcome variety of meals that span multiple continents.

Photograph: Matthew Korfhage

This included a Persian turmeric chicken with dill-currant rice that fits seamlessly into Marley Spoon's repertoire, deglazing with lemon juice instead of wine. The rice was toasted, then cooked with currants and spinach. It was simple, elegant, and kind of a treat. Among the pan-Asian dishes, this was the most successful.

Other international meals are less faithful translations.

The essence of a Moroccan tagine is the hours it spends braising and caramelizing in a conical clay pot. The challenge for a meal kit is translating this to a 45-minute meal. Marley Spoon's chefs achieved this on a beef and apricot tagine largely by calling for fast-browning the onions and carrots rather than slowly caramelizing them, and using ground beef in place of a richer cut that would require a slower cook.

The flavors, a mix of almond and dried apricot and northern African baharat spice, were delicious. The cook was easy and intuitive, with minimal prep. When the recipe called for 30 to 40 minutes of cooking, it was actually true. But the dish doesn't contain the depth or sweetness of long-braised meat and onion. It was the Rachael Ray version of global cooking, the one where we get real with ourselves and admit we don't want to try so hard.

An Indian-derived keema matar was likewise the tired-parent version, made with tomato paste and Cento tomato sauce: It resembled, more than anything, a garam masala sloppy joe. That said, it promised to be a 20-minute recipe and nearly achieved this.

A similar effect arrived with a crispy rice and braised-beef bibimbap oven bake, which involved crisping up precooked jasmine rice in an aluminum baking tray. Making my own ssamjang was a fun little exercise, and I'll always like beef over lightly crispy rice. But the resulting meal was no substitute for marinated and wok-fried beef with rice crisped on a stone.

Moving Forward

Photograph: Matthew Korfhage

These streamlined recipes aren't a problem, though the excellent cooking technique of the classic recipes remains Marley Spoon's backbone and chief strength. Many households will be glad of the 15-minute meals as a weeknight option. Ease is what a meal kit is designed to do. A meal kit gives you a roadmap to flavors you wouldn't have arrived at yourself, while streamlining effort. I enjoyed each of Marley's 15-minute dishes on its merits, the way you enjoy a breezy ride on a short track.

The microwavable meals are further convenience, though I don't overly recommend them. And a ready-to-mix market salad offered rough, stemmy kale and supermarket brand Ken's Caesar dressing, whose main flavor note was soybean oil.

This apparent renewed focus on ease of prep would amount to a repositioning of what kind of meal kit Marley Spoon actually is. If it previously was the meal kit that stood best on fundamentals, it's now also competing on seemingly the same ground as HelloFresh: variety, convenience, breezy globetrotting flavors. What's less clear is whether it will be as successful in doing so.

Marley Spoon still fares best when it hews to its strengths. Good cooking. Good recipe development. Chefs who make real meals.

Update March 9, 2026: This review has been updated with context from Marley Spoon marketing head Carrie King, noting expansions in the meal kit's variety over many months, and Marley Spoon's continuing partnership with Martha Stewart.