Home Cooking Delivery Service Marley Spoon Snags Another $17 Million From Investors

As busy as people are these days, many still want to feel like they're making some semblance of effort to put a proper dinner on the table — hence the current popularity of meal delivery services like Blue Apron. One competitor hoping to make a major impression in the category is Marley Spoon, which according to TechCrunch just raised an additional $17 million in funding.

The Berlin-based company launched in the U.S. last spring, and also currently serves Germany, the Netherlands, Australia, and the U.K. The service is similar to Blue Apron: Customers receive recipes and pre-portioned ingredients for four meals per week, facilitating home-cooked dinners minus all the grocery store trips (and the extraneous produce that inevitably gets thrown out).

The company intends to use its Series B funding to expand further into the U.S., with plans to serve both the East and West coasts and the South; it will also open a new fulfillment facility in San Francisco. The company has now raised a total of $32 million.

While meal delivery services have plenty of loyal fans who relish the convenience factor, opponents point to the environmental impact of all that packaging, and argue that such services are just a mindless extravagance for the most well-off Americans. Nonetheless, it seems the category is still poised for plenty of growth: Blue Apron raised an additional $135 million last summer, with the company valued around $2 billion.