Meal delivery service Splendid Spoon sends you breakfast and lunches, in the form of soups and grain bowls, that are ready to heat and eat in two minutes or less. Each meal contains no more than 400 calories, and they’re not only GMO-and-meat-free, but vegan, too. The company’s new, expanded menu options include noodle dinners and high-protein meals. And when you’re ready to cool down, you can grab a pre-made smoothie from the fridge and drink it straight from the bottle. Splendid Spoon is the pinnacle of convenience, with a variety of tasty flavors. The hitch—and this is the case with all heat-and-eat services—is there are no fresh, raw vegetables or fruits, and some meals suffer as a result.
How Much Does Splendid Spoon Cost?
Compared with shopping and preparing your own meals, most meal delivery services are expensive, somewhere around $12 per serving. That’s not far off what we’d expect to pay for decent takeout. Splendid Spoon’s prices vary based on how many items you order at a time. It ranges from $9 to $13 per item.
- Breakfast Plan: 5 smoothies for $65 ($13 apiece)
- Lunch Plan: 5 soup and grain bowls for $65 ($13 apiece)
- Breakfast and Lunch Plan: 5 smoothies, 5 soup and grain bowls for $95 ($9.50 apiece)
- Breakfast, Lunch, and Reset Plan: 5 smoothies, 5 bowls, 5 light soups for $135 ($9 apiece)
- Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner and Reset Plan: 5 smoothies, 5 soup and grain bowls, 5 noodle dishes, 5 light soups for $185 ($9.25 apiece)
We have a hard time justifying $13 for a bottled smoothie. Then again, we would have a hard time paying $13 for a fresh smoothie. For the bowls and noodles, around $9.50 per item seems reasonable, considering that’s about what you’d pay for any other ready-made meal subscription service. In the grocery store, the going rate for a prepared frozen meal is $3.50 to $6. Not many grocery store brands are vegan, gluten-free, and as healthful as the food Splendid Spoon makes, however. Also, you have to consider how much the convenience of a subscription-based delivery service is worth to you.
Menu Options
Splendid Spoon divides its menu into smoothies, soups, grain bowls, and noodle bowls.
Smoothies are pre-blended drinks, usually containing fruit and some kind of protein-rich ingredient, such as pea powder, hemp protein, chia seeds, or almond butter. Each bottle has a list of ingredients right on the front. If you’re new to protein powders, be forewarned that they can add a chalky or gritty texture.
Soups are soups, although there’s a difference between regular soups and light soups, which contain fewer calories and come in slightly smaller portions. Among Splendid Spoon’s soups you’ll find wonderful flavor profiles, such as channa potato stew with tamarind and cilantro, kabocha squash congee, and butternut squash ratatouille. Light soups range from fennel consommé to pumpkin pear bisque.
Grain bowls consist of a few ingredients, usually vegetables, served over a grain. A Tuscan white bean and tomato dish, for example, comes with greens, fennel ragout, and sorghum—a type of grain that looks like pearl couscous (we had to look it up).
The noodles are new, and only come with the largest plan. Quite a few of the noodle dishes use Asian-inspired flavors, such as green curry with lemongrass and red curry with Thai basil. There’s also a marinara dish with vegan meatballs, and a few others.
Splendid Spoon has several varieties of 3-ounce Wellness Shots. Do they do anything for your “wellness?” It’s unclear. Still, the ginger, lemon, orange juice one tastes delicious, and the new “Recovery Shot” (watermelon, cherry, beets, ginger, and lemon juice) did alleviate muscle soreness after a long workout.
There are other no-cook delivery services, such as Veestro, bistroMD, Freshly, and its sister brand FreshlyFit. Splendid Spoon is the only one that focuses on breakfast and lunch. For exceptionally busy people like hospital workers who want to still eat healthfully—or folks with different abilities for whom cooking is difficult or unsafe—it may really make sense to keep some Splendid Spoon meals on hand.
Splendid Spoon Packaging
Shipments arrive on Wednesdays and Fridays. Our first one was packed with five smoothies, five bowls, and one Wellness Shot. A warning label told us to watch out for dry ice, which had apparently sublimated by the time we opened the box. Despite the dry ice being gone, most of the soups and bowls were still frozen. The cardboard and paper-based liners had done their job. We popped a few of them directly into the freezer, and put the rest in the refrigerator.
If you worry about spoilage with more traditional meal delivery kits, it’s way less of a problem here because there’s no meat, eggs, or dairy to go bad. Even on a hot day, we wouldn’t have worried about this box sitting out unrefrigerated for many hours.
Soups and bowls come in what looks one-pound deli containers. You can recycle them, or reuse them if you’re low on plastic food containers (the containers are the right size to house a pound of cream cheese).
The closest competitor to Splendid Spoon that we’ve tested is Daily Harvest, which uses compostable containers instead of plastic. Daily Harvest also sells smoothies and bowls, but it really capitalizes on ingredients that are trendy in the wellness world, like maca, chlorella, and lion’s mane.
Cooking and Eating
Of all the Splendid Spoon meals we tried, we enjoyed the soups the most. You heat the soups either on the stovetop or in a microwave for about two minutes. The same is true for the grain bowls. Why did we like the soups more? It comes down to texture. With soups, you expect some amount of uniformity. Unless you put fresh toppings on your soup, everything should be warm and mostly soft (remember, no meat).
With the bowls, we expected contrast. Cashews atop a pile of coconut curry and rice should be crunchy. But because they were microwaved, they weren’t. We wanted a bite of freshness from the green onions on the Cuban black bean bowl with plantains, but again, there was only soggy warmth.
That Cuban bowl needed a few tablespoons of water added before heating it up, too, as it seemed way too dry all around. A handful of fresh cilantro would have done wonders for it.
There were some pleasant surprises, the like green split pea with tarragon and basil. Lovely, whole, perfectly round peas give the soup structure. A helping of diced carrots adds a pop of color. Subtle hints of tarragon come through, riding on the brightness of a little lemon juice. Who knew split pea soup could have such character!
The Mexican tomato chili with quinoa and ancho chili tasted nearly identical to a slow cooker meal. Add some cheddar cheese (sorry, vegans), fresh cilantro, thinly sliced jalapeño, a squeeze of lime, and a shot of hot sauce to breathe a little more life into the soup.
The portion sizes are good. One bowl is a meal—filling without leaving you feeling stuffed. If you’re especially hungry, and you can easily build a larger meal around one of Splendid Spoon’s entrees. Add some naan to the red lentil dal, for example, or spoon some diced avocado and fresh cut corn on top of another bowl.
We also tried two of Splendid Spoon’s new high protein meals. The kimchi fried quinoa edamame grain bowl had fantastic stir-fry flavor and felt more filling than other meals either because of the denser ingredients or more generous serving size. The green tomatillo chili soup suffered from some of the same textural issues we experienced with other bowls, but it did have a nice tang.
Of the smoothies we tried, dragon fruit berry stands out for its fresh, perky taste. AB&J (almond butter, banana, strawberry) was our least favorite, coming off as bland and gloppy. Chocolate cherry was the winner. We were fully expecting to turn our noses up at its chocolatey flavor. Instead, we happily nibbled all the tiny cacao nibs suspended throughout it.
How Splendid Is Splendid Spoon?
Splendid Spoon sells slightly elevated all-vegan convenience food. The meals contain good portions of plant-based foods. If you need help eating better in a pinch, it’s a good way to go—at least some of the time. There’s an element of the unexpected with Splendid Spoon—flavors we thought we would like were different from what we actually enjoyed when got down to eating. You may need to experiment a bit to find the right soups and smoothies.
Would we sign up for Splendid Spoon again? The money doesn’t seem worth it for the smoothies, but the soups are a solid go-to choice for when you’re pressed for time. We love that they can sit in the freezer, and it’s easy to picture them making for a convenient lunch, so long as you have a few fresh extras on hand to jazz them up. Some of them would benefit tremendously from light touches in the kitchen, a handful of fresh herbs, say, or a few drops of hot sauce.
If you’re interested in trying other meal delivery services that involve cooking, Purple Carrot is best for vegans. PCMag has also named five Editors’ Choice winners among meal delivery services. Hungryroot is the only one with a vegan plan, and it’s unusual in that it picks groceries for you based on your preferences, and includes suggested recipes. The other top scorers in testing are Blue Apron for people who want to learn to cook; Green Chef for plant-forward meals and vegetarian, paleo, and keto options; MisenBox for receiving quality, local restaurant food nationwide; and HelloFresh for its all-around excellent menus and quality. Keep in mind that all these plans require cooking, however, and Splendid Spoon does not.
