Earlier this year my family started getting a box of fruit and vegetables delivered to our house each week. We decided to order from a company called Ooooby — Out Of Our Own Backyards — because they specialise in local, organic produce, but there are a ton of other companies offering a similar service.
After a couple of months using the service, here are five reasons I love our fruit & veg box.
1. It’s fresh, local, seasonal, and organic
So this is four reasons rolled into one, but they’re all related. Ooooby makes a point of sourcing all their produce as locally as possible. The fruit and veg arrives fresh at our doorstep within a day of being delivered to Ooooby. Because the food is fresh and locally grown, it’s in season too. And Ooooby also focuses on organics, making it much easier (and cheaper, and less packaged) than buying organic produce at a store.
2. It’s super convenient
Between our weekly Ooooby box delivery and a bulk shopping trip for dried goods every month, we don’t have too much more in the way of grocery shopping. That saves a lot of time each weekend that we used to spend traipsing around the supermarket.
3. It’s like Christmas every week
I get excited about receiving a package full of healthy, tasty goodness each week! Opening up the box and seeing all the fresh colours there gives me a thrill similar to unwrapping Christmas presents — but without all the waste and misdirected consumerism.
Sneak peek… look at that colour!
A week’s worth of delicious fresh fruit and vegetables
4. We get to try new types of food
Each box comes with a different variety of fruit and veg, depending on what Ooooby’s growers have available that week. And each box includes all sorts of items I never would have bought (or even seen) when shopping at the supermarket! So far the new types of food I’ve tried cooking thanks to Ooooby include:
- Chestnuts
- Kale
- Beetroot
- Tatsoi
- Jerusalem artichokes
- Fennel
- Daikon radish
We’ve also received exciting new varieties of familiar plants, like pointy capsicums and rainbow chard.
Another week’s haul (minus a bunch of kale that had already been sent to the fridge)
5. It’s (almost) waste-free!
The main packaging is the box, which Ooooby collect and reuse each delivery. Aside from tape on the box, paper to protect leafy greens, paper bags for dirty root vegetables, and the odd rubber band, our produce now comes virtually packaging-free, which makes it much easier to avoid plastic and other waste — perfect for Plastic Free July. It also means no more pesky fruit stickers! And we can now buy organic, fair-trade bananas without the plastic tape they come wrapped in at the supermarket.
Of course, getting our produce delivered is not a perfect setup. We have less control over how much fruit and veg we get each week — some weeks we’re barely scraping by and others we end up with a lot more than we need. And when the supply chain is this short and local, any hiccups at the supplier’s end have a much greater influence on us as consumers. But on balance, I’m totally in love with my weekly produce delivery and I highly recommend it as a way to buy local, seasonal, and plastic-free food.
Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with Ooooby in any way; I’m just a happy customer.
I get an Ooooby box too! I love it, I also wrote a blog post about it! I know what you mean though that some weeks there isn’t enough and other weeks there is too much, can be a pain sometimes especially now my garden isn’t very productive.
Awesome! I hadn’t seen your blog post, will have to go check it out 🙂 How long have you been getting the Ooooby box for? I was hoping with time we’d learn to manage the peaks and troughs better but I guess that’s hard to do when it’s so unpredictable.
Custom Box is the way to go! For $2 extra I get to choose exactly what and how much of everything I want in next weeks box. This works really well for us because we have some fruit and veg in our garden, and this way we can make sure we don’t get anything in our box that we are growing ourselves. You just have to remember to log in and place your order on Thursdays. Last week I didn’t customise our box because we were away on holiday, so today we got a “surprise” lil org mix box. Loved it! Just right! Sometimes the lucky dip is . . . just lucky. I made a delicious celeriac salad. 🙂
Thanks for the suggestion, Angelica! We might have to give that a go 🙂
That’s fantastic! We trialled a local company for a while but they kept giving us new boxes every time. They wouldn’t take them back, so we stopped using them. We had piles and piles of boxes (still do!). I did love the surprise aspect of receiving whatever was in season. How did you cook/eat the Jerusalem artichokes? I still have never tried them.
Oh a new box every week would be frustrating! We roasted the Jerusalem artichokes and I think we also tried them mashed with potato. I got the impression you could treat them like any other starchy root vegetable.