Top pick
Although the recipes are still easy to follow, Martha Stewart’s meal kit appealed most to testers with just a little more cooking knowledge. It also wins points for satisfying vegetarian options.
Who it’s for: Martha & Marley Spoon is best for already adept cooks. Although none of the recipes were wildly complicated, they assume a little more basic knowledge, and may involve tasks like dredging and frying food.
Why we like it: Our experienced cooks found more appealing recipes among Marley Spoon’s offerings than from Blue Apron’s. The dishes are relatively simple and the recipes are usually easy to follow, but they sometimes require more advanced skills (like frying) or some of your own ingredients (like flour). Marley Spoon is also better for vegetarians, as they offer about a dozen vegetarian options per week.
Though our testers’ average numeric ratings for the meals from each kit were incredibly close, Marley Spoon meals generated some of the most enthusiasm in the comments. Based on what our testers wrote, 14 out of 50 Marley Spoon meals exceeded expectations, a few more than any other kit. This might have something to do with the fact that the Martha of Martha & Marley Spoon is Martha Stewart, who has partnered with the service in the US (it also exists in several European countries). The recipes—some of them developed by veterans of Martha Stewart Living—feel pulled from the pages of Everyday Food, her defunct home cooking magazine, although in actuality they’ve been written specifically for Marley Spoon.
Marley Spoon offers over twice as many meal choices per week as Blue Apron, but some recipes may repeat a little more often. We don’t see that as a problem, though, given the number of new choices each week—it might even be a benefit if you find a recipe you love.
The vegetarian choices have some good variety. Though pasta still pops up frequently, it’s usually more filling stuffed pasta like ravioli, and it’s balanced with a wide array of other dishes like quinoa and lentil curry or cauliflower steaks with beans and almond-olive relish. If you’re interested, they even have two smoothie options each week (not counted in our number of meal choices). Notably, the vegetarian tester who tried Marley Spoon enjoyed it enough to consider continuing the service on her own.
Although we don’t love all the packaging used by every meal kit, we do appreciate that Marley Spoon uses more paper, which is easier to recycle. The ingredients for each meal aren’t portioned into separate bags, which reduces packaging, but can also be a bit of a pain when it’s time to cook. (Some meal kits, like HelloFresh and Green Chef, group each meal’s ingredients into paper bags, which we found to be a nice compromise.)
Flaws but not dealbreakers: While Blue Apron never requires you to supply anything beyond salt, pepper, and oil, Marley Spoon recipes occasionally assume you have other ingredients on hand, like sugar, flour, or even eggs. At the very least, it’s annoying to have to use your own egg when you’ve already paid $20 for a meal for two. At worst, it can leave you unable to cook the meal without a trip to the store.
As noted above, Marley Spoon recipes sometimes require a bit more familiarity in the kitchen than those from other kits. The recipes are clear enough that a beginner will still do fine, but they might take longer. Our testers overall averaged 45 minutes per meal cooking Marley Spoon (equivalent to most other kits), but less-experienced testers tended to take 10 to 20 minutes longer than the recipe promised, whereas they came much closer to the cooking times provided by Blue Apron. The bigger issue is that those advanced techniques, like dredging shrimp in flour, then an egg wash, then breadcrumbs, then frying them, make a lot of mess. While the other kits we tested rarely required more cleanup than an average dinner for our testers, Marley Spoon was more work than usual about half the time.
We found Marley Spoon’s ingredients to be quite high-quality (some testers thought the quality surpassed that of other kits), though the company’s website feels a little less upfront about animal welfare compared to Blue Apron. They do, however, discuss their ingredient sourcing as part of a larger sustainability report (pdf).
Specs:
- Price: $10 to $13 per serving for a two-person subscription; $8.70 to $10.50 per serving for a four-person subscription
- Meal choices per week: Over 50 (plus ten premium options), a dozen of which are vegetarian
- Subscription sizes: two to six meals a week for two to four people
