Less Waste, More Taste: Elle Bolland tries the UK’s first 100% plant-based recipe box.
It’s Monday evening after a long first day back to the working week. The dribs and drabs of sad-looking vegetables are falling flaccid against the walls of your fridge and aren’t screaming ‘EAT ME’ in the same way they did ahead of Sunday dinner. You can probably squeeze one more meal out of them – a hash or a bubble & squeak? A soup perhaps? You probably need to do your weekly shop now before it gets too late and you find yourself in concert with all the other failed meal-preppers doing the dreaded supermarket sweep. Here you are again – frantically running to the shops, orchestrating recipes in your head as you’re repeatedly running up and down each aisle because really, you’re unsure what you’re making. So you’re home, putting together a mish-mash of ingredients with some sort of dressing and it tastes ok but nothing amazing – call it pan-stress-fusion. This is where recipe kits such as HelloFresh, Gusto and Mindful Chef are brought into the light!
Personally, I’ve always steered away from recipe boxes for a number of reasons. Firstly, I love food. I love cooking, I love experimenting with recipes. I love knowing what I’m putting in my meals, if it’s good for my body, and more recently I’ve found myself curious to know where my ingredients have come from, whether they’re grown with or around chemicals, and lastly how they’re packaged. While I may seem picky, I’ve not been enticed by the existing offerings and I think this is a predicament many of us find ourselves in since we’re increasingly eco-conscious. There must be a better way for tired employees to grab the ingredients they need for a wholesome, sustainable dinner, right? These were the exact words of Martin, Founder of the UK’s first 100% Plant-Based Recipe Kit, Grubby, in 2019, and these words have inspirited a brand as the first of its kind. So forget leaving the world in a grubby state and create sumptuous meals with a conscience.
The Lowdown
Recipes
With an ever-growing repertoire of 50+ recipes, the Grubby Recipe Development Team come up with clever creations to alleviate the stigma around Vegan cooking, all without being ‘preachy’ about the cause. Instead, their priority is to make plant-based meals quick, easy to follow, and accessible to all. This isn’t to say you’ll be fed with simple tray bakes and tofu every day of the week, in fact, quite the opposite. Think of kaleidoscopic displays of grain salads full of global flavours – flavours similar to those favoured by culinary geniuses like Ottolenghi and Anna Jones but without an ample list of ingredients! I seriously love the originality and format of the recipe cards which include the cooking time (most recipes are under 30 minutes), nutritional info and allergens.
Ingredients
Long live British produce! The majority of the ingredients in your kit are sourced from Watts Farm; a family-ran team with organic farms in Kent, Essex and Bedfordshire. I noticed all of the fresh produce (i.e everything but the pantry items) arrived with no dark spots or mould, no wrinkly skin or wilting leaves – unlike the ingredients I’ve received from competitors.
Packaging
You know when brands pack their products in stupidly big boxes filled with bubble wrap or even worse, polystyrene? The worst thing is that you then have to dispose of all of it (and this stuff can’t be recycled either). The first thing I noticed when the Grubby box arrived is that it wasn’t in copious amounts of packaging, and of the packaging that was used, it was 100% recyclable or compostable. I’m told that 95% of this is actually produced in the UK, demonstrating that the Grubby Box really lives up to its promise.
Delivery
If you’re based in London your box will be delivered by a true eco-warrior in his shining armour (i.e, a bike armed with your veg box!). I kind of wished I was in London just to see this but sadly, I opened my door to the DPD man. Delivery is free nationwide and delivered every Tuesday by low-emission carbon neutral couriers only.
Wastage
All wastage from the Grubby Headquarters is offset to two local food banks, so no grub goes unused.
Logistics
Ordering is so simple – order on a desktop or download the app to have Grubby at your fingertips. Choose your recipes and your delivery date. With no fixed contract, you can place orders up to 6 weeks in advance, skip weeks or change the number of recipes you want whenever you like.
What I loved
- Nutrition; I loved that I was eating up to 6 different vegetables with every meal. Not only did I enjoy the pleasure of looking at colourful plates of food, but I genuinely felt healthier and more satisfied than usual.
- Chop rockin’ beats; every recipe card has a little QR code that will direct you to a Spotify playlist to match that recipe. Tune in and chop for an uplifting experience!
- Portions; coming from someone with a big appetite, trust me that you won’t go hungry. Boxes are made for two people but you could definitely extend this if you wanted to. Missing the meat? You could always pair meals with organic meat from your local butcher to pack the meal out and make more leftovers. After all, Grubby is all about helping the plant-curious transition to a more sustainable way of eating.
- Community; for every box delivered the team at Grubby donates a meal to vulnerable children in Uganda through their partnership with 1morechild. In the height of 2020, they also provided over 1000 meals to NHS staff in London. It was the feedback from this initiative that grew the brand in its early days!
- Transparency; from £5.75 per meal, Grubby are a little more expensive than some other recipe-boxes, but they are really transparent about where your money goes (find the pricing breakdown here) and the expense comes through in the quality.
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