Marie Callender’s Savory Swedish Meatballs Bowl Review

The Marie Calendar’s line is pretty stacked. You’ve got pot pies, chocolate pies, macaroni and cheese, and even basic frozen meals. And now, it seems, they’re dabbling with Swedish meatballs.

So today we’re digging into the Marie Calendar’s Savory Swedish Meatballs Bowl to see what it’s all about. We have to be honest: We’re a bit hesitant. We very recently found a pretty weak-tasting batch of Swedish meatballs (by Michelina’s) that only costs a dollar. We paid $2.50 for these Swedish meatballs, and they were on sale (discounted from $3.69). Is it worth paying more than double for this batch of meatballs? If these have the same level of quality as the Michelina’s version, than no way, dude. However, if these are a decent step up in quality, we’d definitely be willing to pay for a better batch of food.

Then again, the customer reviews for this meal on the Marie Callendar’s website aren’t great, so we’re going in with tampered expectations.

Cooking this is as easy as you’d expect. Pop it into the microwave for three and a half minutes, give it a quick stir, then pop it back in for another minute or two. (If you want to read the full cooking instructions straight off the box, mosey on down to the bottom of this review and check out the package scans.)

The box talks up the “freshly made pasta” and the “real sour cream made from scratch.” So let’s find out if that’s just some copywriting fluff, or if there’s something worth getting excited about. We should point out that most of our reviewers have worked in copywriting, so our instinct is to always assume the box text is exaggerating.

Now, the sauce definitely has that “frozen and reheated” vibe to it. It’s overly watery and kind of chunky, and it also doesn’t have a lot of flavor. We’re not sure that “made-from-scratch” sour cream really helped anything here.

The pasta is alright. It’s not as amazing as the box copy might lead you to believe, but it’s not bad. We do think it could stand to be a little more ruffled, as this stuff ends up pretty flat. Instead of being able to jab at it with our fork, which a ruffled pasta would have been great for, we instead needed to sort of scoop it up. Because the flat noodle shape, and the slippery, watery sauce, it constantly defied us, sliding off of the fork and back into the bowl.

As for the meatballs themselves, they’re actually pretty good. We tend to expect frozen Swedish meatballs to taste a bit meatloafy, and these ones defy those expectations. Instead of going too heavy on the onion, these ones actually have a subtle sausage-like flavor. They’re also soft enough to start crumbling in your mouth, which ends up being a great consistency. These aren’t rubbery at all (which can be a problem for any type of frozen meatball).

This is a bit of a calorie hog. With 460 calories in a bowl, you’re definitely going to want to seek out other options if you’re on a diet. The sodium, however, is lower than we expected, at 610 mg.

The Marie Calendar’s Savory Swedish Meatballs Bowl is pretty mediocre. While the meatballs show promise, the sauce really doesn’t work for us, and we wish the noodles weren’t so limp and slippery. We can see why the customer rating on the Marie Callendar’s page rates this at two stars out of five — it’s not horrible, but there are much better ways to spend two dollars and fifty cents.

To learn more about the nutrition content, ingredients, or cooking instructions for this batch of Swedish meatballs, check out our package scans below.