•Solutions for a fractional reaction diffusion equation.•Different regimes and Interplay.•Anomalous spreading and long tailed distributions. We investigate the behavior of a mass transfer process governed by a set of fractional diffusion equations coupled by appropriate reaction terms. The presence of memory effects in the diffusive term is also considered. For this set of equations, we obtain solutions and analyze the influence of the reaction terms on the spreading of these solutions. Particularly, we observe that for reversible reaction processes the reaction terms play an important role for intermediate times and for long times the processes are essentially governed by the bulk equations. These results show a rich class of behaviors which can be connected to sub- or superdiffusive regime.