This is the moment of the aspiring chef.
Want to have your groceries delivered to your door? Easy. Make the same dinners as world-famous restaurateurs? No problem. Do both, together? There’s a meal kit for you, whatever your diet—omnivore, vegan, gluten-free, organic, kid-friendly, or some combination.
Yet, despite all the options, the buzz and an estimated market value of $1.5 billion, only 3 percent of US adults have tried a meal kit, according to a recent survey from NPD Group.
Martha Stewart is determined to change that.
In August, Stewart announced that she was teaming up with Marley Spoon, a Berlin meal kit company that offers its subscription and delivery service in Germany, the Netherlands, and the U.K. On Oct. 3, the rebranded US arm, Martha & Marley Spoon, based in New York City, announced a particularly American opportunity to give it a go: Thanksgiving.
For $179, customers could order the recipes and all the ingredients they need to make a Martha Stewart-approved Thanksgiving dinner for eight to 10 of the loved ones they deem Martha-worthy. That includes a 12- to 14-pound free-range, antibiotic-free turkey, along with the gravy, sides of stuffing, Brussels sprouts, mashed potatoes (a Stewart family recipe), and apple pie. (A box with just the sides is available for $119.)
As with any Martha & Marley Spoon box, customers will still have to put in the cooking, setup, and cleaning time themselves. For those who missed their chance on Thanksgiving—ordering ended November 16—the box was successful enough that the Martha & Marley Spoon team plans to run more specialized holiday boxes.
Like many of its competitors, Martha & Marley Spoon makes a selling point of high-quality, carefully selected ingredients. In this case, the turkeys are the main attraction. The team looked at a number of options, narrowed them down to three front-runners, held multiple taste tests over the summer, and ultimately decided on Goffle Road Free Range Poultry Farms, in Martha’s home state of New Jersey.
Run by Joseph Goffle, the third generation in his family’s 68-year-old business, the farm easily met the Martha & Marley Spoon animal husbandry standards, and further impressed the company with its environmentally friendly approach, including solar panels that provide 25 percewnt of the farm’s electricity. Most important, the birds themselves “were exactly what we wanted — the right size, the right flavor, super juicy, great texture to the meat,” Culinary Director Jennifer Aaronson said.
The farm raises only about 25,000 turkeys each season, and Martha & Marley Spoon had dibs on just 10,000 of them. But Fabian Siegel, founder and chief executive of Marley Spoon, hopes to find new customers beyond the holiday. “Why not make weeknight cooking just as easy?” he said.
For Stewart, getting into the meal kit business was partly about reducing food waste.
“I get very depressed going to supermarkets,” she told reporters at a press event at her New York City test kitchen in September. To get customers to buy just one head of lettuce, it needs to be surrounded by lots of other unblemished heads, many of which will end up in the landfill. In the U.S., 43 billion pounds of food were wasted in 2010, just at the retail level. Another 90 billion pounds got thrown away at home. That’s a lot of wasted money, too. “Buy a nice pair of shoes for yourself,” she said.