A Complete Review Of Splendid Spoon, From An Editor Who Cares About Ingredients

My love of breakfast is undeniable, and I even eat one of the same two meals every morning for it. But lunch and dinner? I'm sick of everything I make. Not to mention, my schedule is often packed with meetings, so making food is a real pain. 

Splendid Spoon is a plant-based meal delivery service that offers delicious meals designed to support a healthy lifestyle. Altogether the brand offers 65 premade options, including grain bowls, noodles, soups, stews, and dishes, along with an assortment of smoothies.

They offer box sizes of seven, 14, or 21 meals per week, and unlike some subscription services, you get to pick exactly what you want in each box. You can also boost the nutrition content of your box by adding cold-pressed juices and shot bundles (the ginger kind).

Regardless of what items you select, you can expect entirely plant-based offerings made with non-GMO whole foods. They're also free from common allergens, such as gluten and dairy, making them suitable for a wide range of dietary needs.

A perfect option for those trying to make healthy eating more convenient, the hot meals can be thrown together in a matter of minutes, and the premade smoothies can be grabbed from the fridge in seconds.

Now to the good stuff: the actual food! 

Splendid Spoon also offers a wide variety of ready-made and freezer-friendly meal options to choose from. You can choose from a range of lunch and dinner options, as well as smoothies and soups. This means you can mix and match to create a meal plan that works for you. 

When selecting your food, there's a way to filter out dishes with beets (thank god), cilantro, coconuts, mushrooms, seasoning, soy, tree nuts, and spicy foods, or you can focus on the following dietary needs: higher fiber, higher protein, lower calorie, lower carb, lower fat, lower sodium, lower sugar, and blood-sugar-friendly.

As I mentioned, I needed help with lunch and dinner (and perhaps a midday snack). I was looking for fuel to get me through my workday with the lowest effort possible, and Splendid Spoon did just that. Not only did it provide me with easy, healthy sustenance, but it actually tasted good. 

For the bowls and soups, I was worried my lack of microwave would pose a problem, but it was a breeze. I would move the day's bowl of choice from the freezer to the fridge at breakfast, so it wasn't a pain to extract from the container at lunch. I warmed the grain bowl up on the stovetop with a little water. For those of you who have a microwave, these containers are all BPA-free and microwave-friendly.  

As for the portions, many of the meals come with two servings. On the box it mentions you can eat both servings depending on your hunger, and they're right. The meals aren't too calorically dense, and I appreciate the emphasis on listening to your hunger cues. I will say other than the soups, the meals are decently filling. Even my husband, who eats larger portions than I do, was pleasantly surprised by how satiating they were.

Of course, there have to be some cons. I found a few of the grain bowls to be a bit boring (more on that below), but I treated those like bases for other things I have in my kitchen. For example, to the Kimchi Fried Quinoa Grain Bowl, I added some of my own kimchi for extra zing and a fried egg (I'm not vegan). Without dressing it up, that meal would've been a bit one-dimensional, and those additions took far less time than if I had to prepare a whole meal from scratch. 

The smoothies tasted great, but the consistency was thinner than I liked. There were several smoothies that offered really unique flavors, and I can't wait to recreate them with perhaps a thicker consistency. The sleeper hit was the Blue Majik Smoothie, which has blue spirulina, sea buckthorn berry, banana, almond butter, and organic pea protein. 

I'm a stickler for ingredients and always on the lookout for processed seed oils or other sneaky inflammatory additives. The labels were surprisingly clean for a meal-delivery service. I found many of the meals to taste a bit rich, but the ingredients were relatively clean. 

All the plastic meal containers can all be recycled once rinsed, so for a meal delivery service that uses plastic, Splendid Spoon is relatively sustainable. All the smoothie containers are made with #1 PET plastic, while bowls are #5 PP plastic and lids are #4 LDEP plastic. Remember: Not all plastics are created equal, and it's important to note that #5 PP or polypropylene plastic is not accepted by all local recycling centers.