Guilty grazing
You might have a problem with the volume of packaging that their product creates, but it’s hard not to love graze.com, a company who deliver healthy snacks to your desk. I have been well and truly seduced – even if I do feel a hefty twinge of guilt with every box I receive.
graze.com operates a similar model to wine clubs – you sign up for a regular delivery (which you can cancel or push back anytime) but instead of receiving a box every few months, Graze boxes arrive on as many days of the week as you like and instead of wine, they supply fresh fruit, dried fruit, nuts and seeds in a beautifully presented, letterbox sized box. The quality of the goods is exceptional and the range of ingredients is really unusual; I’ve never tasted dried blackcurrants or dried morello cherries before. (They are both delicious, by the way.) At £2.99 a box, including delivery, it’s almost hard to see how they’re making any money.
9NTR77N
Their use of social media – Twitter and Facebook in particular – to grow awareness of the brand is brilliant. Most people get their first box free and their second half-price, via a promo code posted online by one of their friends (mine is 9NTR77N if you want to try it out). As soon as you sign-up, you get your own promo code to pass on to your friends, with one-click buttons to post a link to Twitter and Facebook. Every time your code gets used, you get £1 off another box. Like pyramid selling for pineapples. I don’t have all that many followers on Twitter but already four of them have signed up from my code. If each of them get another four people to sign up, and each of them get another four people to sign up – well, you get the idea. A quick search of Twitter reveals how often these codes are being passed on.
Their site is as gorgeous as the product. It’s all very web 2.0, in its design and functionality. Personalisation is a big trend right now – think of Moo cards for the ultimate bespoke business cards – and graze.com’s rating system (bin, try, like or love) keeps you engaged with the brand by allowing you to tailor the product to your tastes.
Reduce, reuse, recycle
The company do use a lot of recycled material in their packaging and encourage consumers to recycle again, but it’s difficult to ignore the environmental impact of this product. Recycling is good but reducing packaging is better. And there’s still the fuel used in transporting the box to your home / office. But I’ve been well and truly seduced and despite the tuts of disapproval from some of my coworkers am going to continue to enjoy my guilty grazing.
What about you? Have you tried graze.com yet? What’s your view on the product and its green credentials?
Tags: graze
I’ll carry on tutting, I’m afraid: you can buy exactly the same products with far less packaging and, recycled or not, packaging is EVIL.
I must recognise, however, that from a marketing point of view, they’ve done a remarkable job: it’s difficult to resist such a beautiful product.
a note on the green cred- the fuel used in tarnsporting the box to your home/office doesnt count, in my book, as each box comes via royal mail. So the product isnt causing any extra fuel use – instead, it’s using an existing service. So the lack of food miles counts in its favour i reckon.
@lightf It’s a fair point and one that graze.com used to make themselves on their site (although I can’t find it anymore). It’s true that they’re distributing their product via a service which already delivers daily to every address in the UK, so no special trips are being made. But there is still the fuel cost of carrying the goods and the packaging, although you could argue that these would be pretty much the same whether I bought my snacks from a shop – they would still have had to be transported there.
@céline Yes, and those dates in today’s Rock the Casbah mix really did taste like the finest vanilla ice cream, didn’t they?
You’re just too lazy to make your own sandwiches.
This company are a rip off. The food inside is not worth the cost. I can not remember my password and you can not contact Graze directly you can only contact them via their website. They have 4 times said they have sent me my password and they haven’t and have tried to report a technical fault. They can contact to charge me £2.99 each week and I can do nothing to stop it except my bank have now written to them and they have a month in which to stop charging me. Outrageous, a company like this should have a telephone number
Have you tried contacting them via Twitter? They seem pretty responsive to customer services issues there.
http://twitter.com/grazedotcom