I've been ordering meal kits almost every week for over a year now, and Marley Spoon* is one of my favorite meal kit services in Germany. It's so easy and convenient: you choose your dishes from the weekly menu, and a box arrives at your door with pre-portioned ingredients and recipe cards. Marley Spoon delivers across Germany, with meal plans for one to six people and around 120 dishes to pick from each week. Unpacking the box every Monday to see what I'll be cooking is one of my favorite moments of the week.
I couldn't find any detailed English-language reviews of Marley Spoon in Germany, so this article is exactly that: why I like meal kits in the first place, how the whole process works from picking dishes to the box arriving at your door, what it costs with a detailed per-portion calculation, and my honest thoughts on where it falls short.
Note: this article contains affiliate links, which are marked with *.
A week of dinners, delivered to your door. Photo: Marley Spoon
Are Meal Kits Worth It in Germany?
Meal kits are worth it if you want dinner sorted without spending time on planning and grocery shopping, and they're worth it twice over if you live alone and want to minimize food waste. Deciding what to eat every night is a drain on your time and energy, and that's exactly what meal kits solve.
What they do for me is remove the parts of cooking I don't enjoy while leaving the part I do. I like cooking – what I don't like is scrolling through recipes until I get overwhelmed by infinite choice, writing a shopping list with correct amounts, going to the supermarket and carrying it all home. With a box, it's all much easier: I pick the dishes, choose a delivery slot, and get a box delivered to my doorstep. The whole thing takes about twenty minutes a week, and my dinners for the next days are sorted.
Then there's food waste, especially if you live alone or aren't very experienced with meal planning. However carefully I write my shopping list, I still end up throwing things out because I couldn't use them in time. With a meal kit, ingredients are exactly measured to the recipe, so there's zero waste, which I find very satisfying.
Variety is another reason I enjoy meal kits. I often cook the same dishes on autopilot to save mental energy, but a box is a good way to try dishes you haven't made before, with ingredients you wouldn't normally buy yourself. I sometimes reorder dishes I loved, but most of the time I pick new ones, so my meals are a lot more varied and interesting than they used to be. My cooking skills have improved too – you can learn a lot from cooking new recipes every week.
How Does Marley Spoon Work in Germany?
Marley Spoon* in Germany works as a weekly subscription: you choose a plan, pick your dishes from the menu, and a box arrives at your doorstep with pre-portioned ingredients and a recipe card for each meal. You can skip any week you don't want one or cancel at any time.
You can choose from two box options. The Classic box is the standard meal kit with raw pre-portioned ingredients that you'll cook from scratch. You set how many people you're cooking for (2 to 6) and how many meals you want that week (anywhere from 2 to 6). Express & ausgewogen is a one-person box for those short on time, with 4 to 8 meals a week and dishes that only take 10–20 minutes – some are fully prepared and only need reheating, others are just simple and fast recipes.
I personally order the Classic box: I don't mind spending a bit more time cooking, and I find the recipes there more interesting. I get the two-person plan, which gives me two portions of each dish – dinner, then lunch the next day.
You can pick your dishes from ~120 recipes each week, including 40-45 vegetarian options, 32 gluten-free ones and 15 vegan. You can filter the recipes by dietary preference, cooking time, protein type, cuisine and allergens. The menu is published four weeks ahead, so you can pick everything well in advance if you like to plan ahead. You can also change your dishes, skip a week or cancel up to six days before delivery.
For delivery, you pick a half-day or full-day window when you finalize your box, and you get an email a day or two beforehand that narrows it to a two-hour slot. Marley Spoon delivers with DPD or UPS, so you can give permission to leave the box in a safe place if you won't be home. Everything arrives insulated with cooling packs, so even if it's delivered in the morning and you can only pick it up after work, that's not a problem. Once in the fridge, the ingredients stay fresh for at least four days (except perhaps fish and seafood – check the packaging for expiry dates).
This is what my box looks like once I've picked my dishes for the week.
How Much Does a Marley Spoon Box Cost in Germany?
Marley Spoon prices in Germany run from €4.99 to €9.69 per portion at full price, depending on how many people and meals you order, plus €6.99 delivery on every box. New customers get 35% off their first box*, which brings it down to between €4.05 and €6.16 per portion with delivery included – excellent value for the quality you get. The bigger the box, the less each portion costs. Here are the prices for your first box depending on the number of portions:
2 people × 3 meals (6 portions): €36.98 including delivery, or €6.16 per portion
2 people × 4 meals (8 portions): €44.38 including delivery, or €5.55 per portion
3 people × 4 meals (12 portions): €56.52 including delivery, or €4.71 per portion
4 people × 3 meals (12 portions): €52.93 including delivery, or €4.41 per portion
4 people × 4 meals (16 portions): €64.83 including delivery, or €4.05 per portion
The discount runs across your first five boxes: 35% off the first, then 20%, 10%, 10% and 20%. After that, the subscription becomes full-priced, which is between €4.99 and €9.69 per portion depending on your plan. Marley Spoon then applies an automatic discount that grows with the size of your order. Last time I ordered ten portions and received a 36% discount, which brought it down to a really good price for the quality you get: €6.19 per portion on most dishes.
The more you add to the box, the bigger the discount gets – this 10-portion box is at 36% right now.
Is Marley Spoon Good Quality?
The quality of the meals is the main reason I keep ordering from Marley Spoon*. The meat and fish are great, the vegetables are fresh, the portions are generous, the sauces and spice mixes add flavor, and the recipes have clearly been developed by someone who cares about how the food tastes. Every box I've received contains a lot of raw produce, so the meals are fresh and barely processed.
The dishes are delicious: I had chicken legs with raisins and pear bulgur two months ago, and I still think about that dish. Recent recipes include a Sicilian tuna steak with bulgur, orange and chicory salad, and a meatball stew with pearl couscous, spinach and lemon (I'm getting hungry even writing this). Some dishes use seasonal ingredients, which I love – there was asparagus all through spring.
The protein variety is better than in other boxes I've tried. You get chicken thighs and legs rather than only breast, which gets boring week after week, and salmon dishes cost the same as everything else on the menu. Meat and fish dishes run up to 40g of protein, which covers my goals. If you need more, you can add extra chicken, meat or falafel from the market.
Each dish comes with a printed recipe card. These are in German, but you can open the same recipe on the website and translate the page in Chrome to have the recipe in English in front of you, which is what I do.
The chicken leg with raisins and pear bulgur – the dish I still think about a lot.
What Else Can You Add to a Marley Spoon Box?
Beyond the meals, Marley Spoon has a marketplace of extras you can add to your box – fruit and vegetables, meat, bread and pastries, juices, yogurt, cheese, snacks and pantry staples. I use it mostly for fruit, which saves me a separate grocery run and, more importantly, carrying it all home. My other picks from the extras list: quiche, protein bars, burrata and quark. Here is what else is on offer:
Fruit and vegetables: they come either as mixed boxes (a 1.7kg fruit box, a 1.18kg veg box) or as single items if you only want a few things (broccoli, apples, pears, mangoes, etc.)
Breakfast: there is a really wide range – croissants, raisin rolls, banana bread, sourdough baguette, Turkish flatbread, Greek yogurt and overnight oats.
Juices and smoothies: cold-pressed orange juice, apple-pear-raspberry juice, and mango or strawberry smoothies.
Cheese: Manchego, Appenzeller, Emmentaler and burrata, plus a mixed cheese board if you're entertaining.
Desserts: lemon butter cake, gluten-free chocolate muffins, and cheesecake-style quark in flavors like raspberry and mango-passionfruit.
Organic meat: worth a look if you cook beyond your box dishes or if you want to add more protein to your recipes. Options include chicken breast fillet, beef mince, patties, sausages, rump steaks, entrecôte and marinated lamb skewers.
Prices on extras also drop as your box grows. As an add-on to a 6-portion box, a 1.7kg fruit box is €6.34 instead of €7.99, and organic chicken breast is €5.55 instead of €6.99. Order more and the price decreases further – on my last box of ten portions everything was 36% off the regular price, extras included. The market also runs its own sales separately from that, so prices on some items are reduced even further.
Get 35% off your first Marley Spoon box
Plus 20% off your second box, and around 120 recipes to choose from each week
Is Marley Spoon Hard to Cancel?
Cancelling Marley Spoon is easy, and so is skipping a week or pausing for a while – you can do it quickly from your account settings without speaking to anyone. The only rule is timing: changes have to be made 6 days before your next delivery. When you subscribe to Marley Spoon in Germany, there's no minimum commitment, so you can order the first discounted box and stop there if you want to: just cancel right after you receive your box.
Each step is described in detail and comes with a photo, which makes recipes easy to follow.
What Are the Downsides of Marley Spoon?
The obvious downside of Marley Spoon in Germany is the price. Meal kits generally cost more than buying the same ingredients yourself, and no amount of discount changes that – you're paying for the portioning, the delivery and the convenience of it all. If your food budget is tight, this isn't where I'd spend the money.
The packaging is the other thing. Almost everything is recyclable, including the shipping box itself, but there is indeed a lot of packaging: every ingredient comes in its own bag, so a week of dinners from the box produces a lot more waste than the same meals cooked from a supermarket shop would.
Lastly, Marley Spoon might not be for you if your schedule is so unpredictable that you can't say whether you'll have time to cook. Some dishes and ingredients can be frozen, but others come with fresh salads and vegetables that need to be eaten within a few days of delivery.
Is Marley Spoon in Germany Worth It? My Verdict
Marley Spoon in Germany is worth it if you want to spend less time thinking about food and more time actually eating well, and if you're happy to pay a bit more for that. It suits people who like cooking but not planning, anyone who lives alone and throws away half a bunch of parsley every week, and anyone who wants to eat more varied meals without spending hours looking for recipes.
The easiest way to find out whether Marley Spoon is for you is to try it yourself. The first two boxes are excellent value, there's no minimum commitment, and after one or two weeks you'll know whether you enjoy it or you miss your regular supermarket trip.
Try Marley Spoon with a 35% discount
35% off your first box, 20% off the second – cancel any time
Marley Spoon in Germany: FAQ
Is Marley Spoon vegetarian and vegan friendly?
Yes – Marley Spoon is vegetarian and vegan friendly. Of the roughly 120 recipes on the menu each week, 40 to 45 are vegetarian and 15 are vegan, so you can run either as a permanent setting on your account. The Classic box has preference filters for vegetarian, vegan and without added gluten, and the one-person Express & ausgewogen box has a vegetarian filter.
Is Marley Spoon healthy?
Yes, Marley Spoon can be healthy if you choose your dishes with that in mind. The meals are cooked from scratch with a lot of raw produce, so they're fresh and barely processed, and you can see the nutritional value of every recipe when you are choosing your dishes. You can filter by Fit & Gesund for dishes under 650 kcal per portion, or Protein+ for higher-protein meals – meat and fish dishes run up to 40g of protein per portion.
Are Marley Spoon recipes easy to follow?
Yes, Marley Spoon recipes are straightforward and don't require much cooking experience. Everything arrives pre-portioned, so there's no weighing or measuring, and each step is described in detail and illustrated with a photo. The cooking times on the cards are accurate, so dinner is ready when you expect it to be.
How long do Marley Spoon ingredients stay fresh?
Most Marley Spoon ingredients keep for up to a week in the fridge or the pantry. Fish, seafood, fresh herbs and leafy salads are the ones to use first – check the packaging for dates and plan your cooking order around those dishes.
Is Marley Spoon hard to cancel?
No, Marley Spoon is very easy to cancel. You can cancel, pause or skip a week from your account settings, without speaking to anyone. Changes have to be made 6 days before your next delivery, and there's no minimum commitment, so you can cancel right after your first box arrives.
How much does Marley Spoon cost in Germany?
A Marley Spoon box in Germany costs between €4.99 and €9.69 per portion at full price, depending on how many people and meals you order, plus €6.99 delivery on every box. Your first box comes with a 35% new customer discount, which brings it down to between €4.05 and €6.16 per portion including delivery.
Where does Marley Spoon deliver in Germany?
Marley Spoon delivers across Germany with DPD or UPS. Your available delivery days depend on your postcode, and you can give permission to leave the box in a safe place if you won't be home.
Is Marley Spoon available in English?
Marley Spoon's website and recipe cards are in German, not English. This isn't much of an obstacle in practice – you can translate the whole page in Chrome in one click, which is what I do with the recipes.
What makes Marley Spoon worth ordering?
Marley Spoon is worth ordering for the quality above all. The meat and fish are better than the supermarket equivalent, the portions are generous, and every box contains a lot of raw produce rather than pre-prepared components. The menu is big enough that you rarely repeat a dish, the protein options go well beyond the chicken breast that other boxes default to, and the market lets you add fruit, breakfast, cheese and desserts to the same order instead of making a separate trip.
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