Marley Spoon Review: A unique meal kit for seasoned foodies

certainly, Meal kits can save you a lot of time By reducing the hours you spend in the kitchen or at the grocery store each week, but that doesn’t mean the recipes are boring. Marley Spoon makes innovative and delicious meals, which may not be surprising when you know who the woman behind the recipes is: kitchen expert Martha Stewart.

With Marley Spoon, she focuses on targeting home cooks and food lovers with innovative recipes tailored to key skills and discerning tastes. While some Meal kits Designed to appeal to beginners with simple recipes that take only a short time to prepare, Marley Spoon’s meals are a little more indulgent and feature recipes created by Martha. They’re plucked from her cookbook or recipe Rolodex, though none are so intense that you’d need high artistic skill or culinary training to make them.

Curious as we are at CNET about everything Meal kitswe wanted to know how good Martha’s meal kits are — and if they’re worth the money. We tested recipes for a week, once in 2023 and again in late 2025, to bring you this review of the Marley Spoon meal kit delivery service.

How does a Marley spoon work?

Marley Spoon operates similarly to most other companies in this category and offers meal kits with recipes that you cook and Ready meals Which only requires reheating.

After choosing between these two options, you will answer the question: “Which kids’ meals do you like?” Meal kit options include a variety of everyday, low-calorie, low-carb, quick and easy, vegetarian, vegan and Mediterranean meals for two or four people, and you can choose between two and six meals per week. Single-serving meal options include daily variety, low-calorie or low-carb, and you can choose 6, 8, 10, 12, 14 or 18 meals per week.

Your meal kit ingredient box is delivered once a week—unless you skip a week, which is easy to do—and you can either select the recipes manually or let Martha Stewart choose them for you personally. Okay, just kidding: It’s not your personal gateway to meals, but you can let it be Brand Choose meals if you prefer a little mystery. You can choose any day of the week for delivery, and boxes will arrive between 8am and 9pm

There are now over 100 recipes each week, and they range in difficulty levels. Before you choose a recipe for delivery, you’ll see all the steps involved, the estimated time it takes to complete and detailed nutritional information to help you decide.

Marley Spoon Meal Kit Pricing

Number of people	Recipes per week	Total servings per week	Price per serving
2	2	4	$12.99
2	3	6	$11.99
2	4-6	8-12	$10.99
4	2	8	$10.99
4	3	12	$10.49
4	4-5	16-20	$9.99
4	6	24	$8.99

Takeout is $12.99 each and shipping is $10.99 per box.

What do Martha Stewart and Marley Spoon’s meals look like?

As you might imagine, since Martha Stewart helped design the concept and created many of the recipes, there are some really delicious, upscale, and interesting dishes to choose from. Fortunately, most of them are still fairly easy to make.

There are many healthy recipes, as well as dietary preferences, to choose from. However, there are only between four and six vegetarian options each week, so if you want more options, Purple carrot It may be a better option for you. Other services that feature include built-in diet meal plans Green Chef, chef or Hello Fresh.

At Marley Spoon, you’ll find plenty of warm comforting dishes like French Onion Chicken Breast and Beef Stroganoff, plus desserts to add to your box, like baked gingerbread cookies and French-style cheesecake.

When it comes to ready-made meals, the recipes are equally innovative. Some meals include tilapia with smoked tomato sauce and black bean corn, and Merlot chicken meatballs with orzo pasta and green beans.

How easy is it to prepare Martha Stewart and Marley Spoon meals?

Our meals range from very simple to the most complex and time consuming, but the good news is that it’s really up to you how difficult you want the meals to be when making your recipe choices.

For example, my skillet parmesan chicken had several steps such as preparing the chicken, cooking it, preparing the sauce, and preparing the pasta (which has its own ingredients). For someone with a fair amount of cooking experience, this doesn’t pose a challenge, but some beginners may not be ready for such a complex meal. Other meals, like the butternut squash pizza, were so simple and delicious and perfect for a weeknight when you don’t feel like paying too much attention or taking the time to cook.

What we cooked and how it went

Beef Picadillo Pockets with Bell Peppers and Cilantro Chimichurri: Not only was this meal delicious, it was also fun to make. This was my first time using raw dough in a meal kit recipe, and the results were well worth the effort. Although the empanadas were filling, I wish they came with a side dish other than the chimichurri sauce.

Butternut squash pizza with ricotta, almonds and hot honey: I had never had butternut squash on pizza before this meal, but I can definitely see myself doing it again. It was a perfect fall meal with onions, squash, rosemary, and almonds on top.

Seared salmon and citrus butter sauce with mashed potatoes and shredded Brussels slaw: This Brussels sprouts salad helped elevate this simple meal and take it to the next level. I cooked the salmon on the stove and the mashed potatoes in the oven Air fryer.

Parmesan Fried Chicken with Casarecchi and Fried Spinach: This recipe was very good and convenient, although it definitely had a healthy serving of carbs and calories. The red sauce was very simple and the chicken strips were not breaded, so it felt healthier than regular chicken parm but not enough to be truly healthy. I had a lot of leftovers, which was nice.

Honey Miso Salmon with Roasted Carrots and Brussels Sprouts: This recipe was great and healthy, but it wasn’t an out of the ordinary recipe. The salmon was high quality and tasted very fresh.

Restorative chicken soup with sweet potatoes, kale and quinoa: A very tasty and hearty soup that I made and ate all week. The shredded chicken was already cooked, which I was surprised by but also appreciated because it was still moist and flavorful. This entire meal was easy to prepare and felt like nourishing medicine with all those superfoods.

Marley Spoon Support Materials

I found the recipes clear, concise and easy to follow. There’s some great background on the ingredients, too: My salmon recipe provided some context about miso for anyone who might not be familiar with the fermented paste, for example. The Marley Spoon app is also helpful with lots of information about each recipe and gives you the ability to order, pause, cancel or skip a week right from your mobile device.

What makes Marley Spoon different from other meal kit services?

One thing to like about this service is that it doesn’t try to be anything but good. There’s no pandering to fad diets or giving a lot of autonomy to users to change recipes or switch meats. The meal kit service proposition is that the culinary team has come up with thoughtful, often healthy recipes that they think you’ll enjoy—and they ask you to put your trust in them. I wouldn’t go so far as to call it stuffy or stubborn, but there it is He is Something very Martha Stewart about it.

In this respect, it reminds me a little Sun basket. This meal kit service also tries to maintain the integrity of the original recipes they’ve created, and while it may not please everyone, I think it pays off in the end for those who appreciate good food.

Who is Marley Spoon Good?

This is one of the best meal kit services for foodies and experienced cooks looking to change up their weeknight dinner rotation. If you are looking to learn new interesting gourmet recipes and Martha Stewart’s accessible meal kits are a good choice. It’s also a solid choice for the home cook looking to hone new skills or work with new ingredients.

Many of the recipes are suitable for children, so these meal kits will also work well for families of up to four people. And with up to seven vegetarian recipes each week, this is a good meal kit service for vegetarians, vegans, or those trying to sprinkle in a few non-meat dinners weekly.

Who is Martha Stewart and Marley Spoon not for?

If you’re a picky eater, a very new cook, or trying to maintain a gluten-free diet, I wouldn’t suggest this meal kit for you. It’s also not a good meal delivery service if you’re simply looking to get dinner on the table every week and don’t care about the cooking process, since some recipes are involved.

Packaging and environmental friendliness

I found Martha Stewart and Marley Spoon on the eco-friendly side of the meal kit. There was some single-use plastic waste, as there always is, but nothing excessive – and the ingredients were not individually packaged in disposable bags as of 2025. Bins, coolers and ice bags were also recyclable.

Change, skip or cancel your meal kit order

Between the website and mobile app, Marley Spoon makes it super easy to skip weeks, change recipes, or pause your subscription. Any changes must be made six days before the delivery date.

The final verdict on Martha Stewart and Marley Spoon

Being a Martha Stewart meal kit project, I had high expectations for this service and it mostly met those expectations. When I go through the list each week, it has one of the highest percentages of recipes that make me say, “Oh, this looks good” out there. Sun basket. Most importantly, all the recipes we prepare are presented on the basis of a delicious and interesting meal. There were not a lot of inconveniences, which we appreciated very much.

The meal kit service also includes some thoughtful touches that others don’t, like quick explanations of ingredients new cooks may not be familiar with and the different chefs behind some recipes. Produce, meat and fish were also among the freshest products we received from the meal kit service and this goes a long way in creating a truly delicious dinner. The prices are fair for what you get, and if you’re cooking for a large group, the price will actually be quite affordable per serving. Market additions have also grown over the years.

If you want to try a meal kit service that has a range of healthy, delicious and convenient meals and you already have the cooking basics, I say try Martha’s Meals.