Cooking at home is the new eating out – and to prove it, there are plenty of services, both online and offline, designed to make it easier and quicker for today’s busy digital native. The latest such platform is Marley Spoon, the new startup from former Delivery Hero boss Fabian Siegel, which launched on Thursday.
Following in the footsteps of Plated, Hello Fresh and Blue Apron, Marley Spoon will offer seven new dishes, created by professional chefs, each week. Users can order the recipes they like via the website or iPhone app, and the ingredients – together with cooking instructions – will be delivered (in Germany) on a Wednesday or Friday. You can order enough food for up to four portions, and it costs €12 per serving.
Payment is via PayPal or credit card and, unlike some of the other platforms, there is no subscription model.
The idea is to encourage people with limited time in the evenings and a lack of imagination in the kitchen to cook for themselves rather than go out to eat. In a release, the company said that emphasis is placed both on the high quality and freshness of the food and on the transparency and sustainability of the business, with fully recyclable packaging. Marley Spoon will also try to reduce the 11 million tons of food which are thrown away in Germany each year with its precise amounts.
“We want to reinvent the supply chain and reconnect consumers directly with the producer,” said Siegel. “In doing so this opaque trade will be left out in the cold.”
Siegel has moved into the home cooking space from the takeaway food sector, having stepped down as co-CEO at online food ordering platform Delivery Hero (known in Germany as Lieferheld), a company which has raised hundreds of millions in funding, in January 2013. He went on to launch the €150 million Global Founders Capital fund – which invested in British startup Iwoca earlier this year – with Oliver and Marc Samwer.
He will now hope that Marley Spoon – which Siegel founded with Till Neatby, formerly the MD of Latin American gastronomy concept MexAttax – can make serious inroads into the home cooking ingredient space in Germany in the face of a number of well-established rivals.