NEW YORK — Cooking like Martha Stewart is about to get easier.
The home goods mogul and cookbook author is getting into the fast-growing meal kit business. Subscribers will get a box shipped to their door with Stewart's recipes and all the ingredients needed to cook up the dishes at home, including pre-measured raw meat, fish, vegetables and spices.
"It is, I think, the way to cook for the future," Stewart said.
The new venture is a licensing deal with existing meal kit company Marley Spoon and brand management company Sequential Brands Group Inc., which bought Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia last year. Financial details of the new partnership were not disclosed.
Marley Spoon will be renamed Martha & Marley Spoon in the U.S. and will tap Stewart's library of thousands of recipes, including shrimp tortilla soup and chicken thighs pan-fried in coconut oil.
Ready-to-cook meal kits have proliferated in recent years and have been popular with people who want to skip the supermarket and still whip up a meal at home. People around the world spent $1.5 billion on meal kits last year, with less than half of that coming from the U.S., according to research group Technomic. The U.S. market is expected to grow to as much as $6 billion in the next four years, Technomic said.