If you are looking for an easy way to plan your home-cooked meals, you might want to consider subscribing to a meal kit delivery service. With meal kits, you can choose your meals out of a large weekly menu and receive a box with all ingredients pre-portioned and ready to cook. No shopping required!
The only challenge with choosing a meal kit service is that there are now so many to choose from. With such a large number of companies, each with different specialties, it can be confusing to select the option that will suit you the best.
Well… you can rest easy because we are here to help!
In this review, we will compare two of our favorite meal kit services – Home Chef and Martha & Marley Spoon.
Home Chef focusing on delivering easy to prepare meals. The company offers a diverse range of classic and well-known dishes that often come with a nice twist.
Martha & Marley Spoon is known for being the meal kit service created by the queen of all American home cooking – Martha Stewart.
Both companies offer an excellent service, and yet quite different in some ways.
So, let’s dive into the comparison – Home Chef vs. Martha and Marley Spoon!
Home Chef Vs Marley Spoon- Variety of Plans
NEW FROM HOME CHEF! Rachel Ray’s exclusive recipes are now available on the Home Chef Weekly Menu.
Home Chef offers excellent flexibility with deliveries available for two, four, or six people, with a minimum selection required of two dishes per week, with no maximum limitations. On top of that, the company also offers a unique Fresh & easy plan, full of easy-fix options like 15 minutes meal kits, oven-ready meals, grill-ready meals, entree salads, and more.
Martha & Marley Spoon offers two types of plans, both of which you can also order with only vegetarian recipes.
- Two-Person Plan – with two, three, or four meals per week
- Three to Four-Person Family Plan – with two, three, or four meals per week
Variety of dishes Offered By Home Chef and Marley spoon
When it comes to the variety of dishes available, Home Chef offers a selection of over 20 recipes per week. Regardless of the number of people your plan covers, you can choose from all the available recipes.
On the other hand, with Martha & Marley Spoon, you get to choose from 22 different classic dishes every week, all taken from more than 18,000 of Martha’s favorite recipes.
With both Home Chef and Martha & Marley Spoon, you can find various vegetarian, dairy-free, low calorie, child-friendly dishes and recipes that are super quick to prepare. The recipes are diverse and come from a range of culinary styles. With all these options, you can be sure that you will always find something that matches your needs!
Home Chef and Marley Spoon Style of Meals
We have to say that we have tasted many meals from both Home Chef and Martha & Marley Spoon and we were delighted! Both Home Chef and Martha & Marley Spoon focus on the best quality, classic home cooking dishes, with extra attention paid to adding vegetables and greens to almost every meal.
Home Chef tends to include a delicate twist to their classic dishes. The company is also focused on easy prepping meals, with many options ranging from no cooking to 30 minutes of cooking time. Their menu also includes low-carb and low-calorie options.
The Martha and Marley spoon meals are all designed by Martha Stewart and her team. Hence you can expect classic home-cooking meals. Most meals take approximately 30 minutes to prepare, using a very easy-to-follow recipes card. The menu includes low-calorie options, gluten-free friendly meals, dairy-free meals, and more.
Our Honest Tasting Notes
As part of our review process, we taste a wide range of meals from each meal kit service. We tried so many meals from both companies, and our take is that both offer great tasting meals!
Popular Meals from Martha and Marley spoon and Home Chef:
There is really a long list of recommended and popular meal options from both services. Here are just a few of each:
Home Chef:
- Crispy Ahi Tuna and Lemon Pepper Aioli with pesto-Parmesan fingerling potatoes and green beans
- Steak with Garlic-Herb Butter and buttermilk-cheddar mashed potatoes and zucchini
- Blue Cheese-Crusted Chicken with Ranch Green Beans – easy stovetop meal prepping
- Guacamole Pulled Pork Rice Bowl with Crispy Jalapeños – oven-ready meal
- Honey-Ginger Salmon with roasted sweet potatoes and bok choy
Martha and Marley Spoon:
- Smoky Spanish Pork Pan Roast with Lemon Chimichurri
- Chicken Flautas with Guacamole, Shredded Romaine & Salsa
- Crispy Fish Tacos with Pineapple Salsa & Lime Crema
- Panang Coconut Chicken Curry with Peppers, Rice & Peanuts
- Garlic-Lime Marinated STEAK with Spicy Oven Fries & Spinach Salad
Quality of Products
Both Home Chef and Martha & Marley Spoon deliver meal kits that use products that are of exceptional quality. Home Chef uses some high-quality local farm-fresh products, collaborating with farms such as Paysan Breton Butter, ‘World Wide Farms’ for farm-fresh herbs and vegetables, and ‘Sea to Table’ for sustainably sourced seafood.
On the other hand, the quality of the products used by Martha & Marley Spoon, going from all the meals we have tried, is superb! Martha & Marley Spoon work directly with some of the best purveyors to deliver high-quality ingredients such as grass-fed beef, Berkshire pork, American-caught shrimp, artisanal cheeses, and so much more directly to your home kitchen.
The Delivery Box of Home Chef Vs Marley Spoon
Both companies deliver their meal kits in a specially designed and labeled carton box. There is minimum sorting required as each box’s contents are well organized, with each dish individually wrapped and labeled. In the Home Chef’s box, the cooled items are in the box’s bottom with ample ice.
In Martha & Marley Spoon’s box, all cooled items are placed in a separate cooling pouch made from raw, un-dyed cotton filled with ice. Both are packed and organized so that you can be confident that the boxes can stay outside safely for a few hours.
The Registration and Website
Both Home Chef and Martha & Marley Spoon offer well organized and easy to use websites and apps. All that you need to do regarding registering and managing your account can be completed and managed online.
This includes your first registration, choosing your plan and weekly recipes for future weeks, defining eating preferences, changing your payment method, and updating other personal information. You can also find plenty of information on each dish – ingredients, cooking processes, cooking times, nutritional facts, and more.
Flexibility
Both companies offer their service as an ongoing subscription for your weekly meal planning. However, while both give you some flexibility, Home Chef went the extra mile in terms of flexibility:
- Both give you the option to skip weeks or cancel the account whenever you desire with no cancellation fees.
- Both offer great protein-pack add-ons.
- Both offer a vast selection of meals to choose from every week.
- Both offer flexibility in choosing your delivery day, depending on your delivery address.
- Home Chef offers the flexibility to change the protein in your meal selection.
Bottom Line – Home Chef Is Our Winner!
Both companies offer a fantastic meal kit delivery service option, with some great classic home cooking recipes. We were impressed with the quality of ingredients used by these two companies.
We do, however, have a winner – Home Chef!
Mainly because of their more extensive meal variety, the nice twist they offer on each meal, and the great flexibility of choosing the proteins in each meal, as you wish.
Bottom line, if you are looking to upgrade your dinners with classic, authentic restaurant-quality meals that are very easy to cook, our recommendation is to give Home Chef a try!
Don’t forget to use our great beginners’ promotion deal!
