A few months ago we told you about Graze, a new service that delivers fresh fruit, nuts and other ‘healthy’ foods to your place of work to help you snack healthily during the day, and many of you will undoubtedly have spotted people munching from the nifty little brown boxes around the office.
While I can be a bit of a sucker for novelty, I thought Graze was just that, and at £2.99 a box, seemed like an unnecessarily expensive alternative to grabbing a bag of mixed nuts from Tesco on your way to work. However, you can’t knock things till you’ve tried ‘em, so with that in mind, I took advantage of an introductory offer, and signed up for Graze deliveries.
Having opted for the ‘design your own’ box, rather than one of the specially selected ‘Graze nutrition boxes’ and stated my preferences of their extensive range of fresh fruit, nuts, seeds, crackers and other snacks, I eagerly awaited the delivery of my first box.
And I am still waiting for it.
After consulting all the postal services in my building to check it had not been waylaid, I contacted Graze whose response included the following:
“We usually have an excellent delivery record”.
Well fucking done Graze, you give yourself a pat on the back!
Interestingly, friends who were also trialling the service did not receive their graze boxes that day. Did someone get hungry in your dispatch office Graze?
After a series of emails to Graze persuading them that I definitely hadn’t received said box, they credited my account with £1.50. Half the cost of a replacement.
Despite Graze having sullied my already relatively low opinion of the service, I persevered anyway and finally received a box. While the contents of grapes, dried fruit mix and dairy-free chocolate beans was not unpleasant, it was relatively underwhelming, and did nothing to sway my favour from the aforementioned Tesco mixed nuts.
I was also a little suspicious of how healthy the service really was. Stating that they were dairy-free didn’t detract from the fact that the chocolate beans were essentially a packet of Smarties, containing the same calorie content. They may have been dairy-free, but with 70g of sugar per 100g, they’re not exactly screaming ‘healthy snack!’ to me.
Of the three boxes I received the average calorie count was nearly 500, and given the sneaky sugar in the chocolate beans, I wouldn’t put money on those being ‘good’ slow-burning calories.
Oddly enough, I didn’t feel like I wanted to add 500 calories of snacks to my daily diet and decided to cancel.
After all, a bag of nuts would cost me the same, last all week, and not creep up and bite me in the expanding arse like a junk-food wolf in a grass-eating sheep’s clothing.
In conclusion, if you’re too lazy to either go to the shops on your way to the office, or think about what you eat enough to be able to make sensible food choices without it having ‘this is healthy!!!’ stamped all over it, then visit Graze.com and receive your first box for free.
(If you receive it that is).