GrubMarket

A CSA is a great thing — supporting local farmers, and being supplied with wholesome produce in return.  But some of us don’t have access to local CSAs.  (Does anyone know what the “C” in CSA is for?)  Some of us do have access, but aren’t able to make the whole-season-long commitment most require.  This is where GrubMarket comes in!

GrubMarket is like a farmer’s market — in your computer.  Just like an in-person farmer’s market, the produce is grown by producers dedicated to farmer’s market-like practices: local food, sustainable growth, etc.  One of the core products GrubMarket offers is the GrubBox, and this is the product most resembling a “farm share.”  The GrubBox has a few different options, including a “college care” package!  You can subscribe for delivery every week, two weeks, or four weeks, and stop the subscription at any time.  The box we’re looking at, though, is the California Fruit Bounty.  It comes in two sizes.  The smaller size is what I received for review and you’ll hear more about it in a minute.

If you don’t want the prepackaged option, you can order individual fruits and vegetables.  This is a great way to get access to some varieties that you may not have available locally.  All orders over $59 ship free.  And if you’re wondering how you’re going to make an order of $49 in fruits and vegetables, you don’t have to!  GrubMarket also carries a selection of other healthy lifestyle-friendly products, like fair trade chocolate, awesome snacks, natural cleaning supplies, etc.  Many of us will be buying these items anyway, so they’re a great way to “top off” your order.

The GrubBox

We actually had some items get damaged in shipping the first time around ( 🙁 ) so the GrubMarket folks sent me a second box so I could get a real idea of what a box is normally like ( 🙂 ).  One of the main things we noticed is how different the contents were from one box to the next, so you can be sure you’ll get some good variety.

It comes packaged like this:

And when you pull out all that packing shred, you’ll find something like this:

Below this there’s actually another layer of paper and another layer of fruit.

I’m really glad the majority of the produce had stickers on it, because we didn’t recognize some of it!  This first box had a very “tropical” feel to it, with a pommelo (glad that one was labeled), dates, pineapple, and a pomegranate, along with a variety of other citruses, an avocado, and a few apples and pears.

My daughter decided that dates taste like “a cross between a fig and an overripe banana”!  (They’re very sweet.  It had never occurred to me to eat them plain before.  You can also make date syrup out of them and use that to sweeten baked goods.)

My ragamuffin kids had a blast pulling fruit out of the box and unwrapping everything to see what we had.  (They also enjoy scarfing down the fruit in a hurry!)

Our second box was very different, and much more familiar.  It consisted primarily of apples, pears, and small citrus fruits (tangerines, etc. — and a few blood oranges, which we’d never seen before, and which the kids said were gross because they looked like “orc blood” haha), with a bag of kiwifruit.  Here you can see the whole box’s worth of fruit together:

That’s a pretty terrible picture; sorry.

As you can see, even though “apples and pears” doesn’t sound like a lot of variety, there actually was a good bit of variety.  Not all the pears were the same type of pears, and not all of the apples were the same variety.  It was fun getting to try apple varieties (like Opal) that we hadn’t had before.

(Side note: we found this recipe to try with our blood oranges.)

What Do I Think?

I love the GrubBox, but I don’t think we could do delivery every month.  It takes us too long to figure out what to do with some of the unfamiliar fruits, so if there are too many new things at once, some of it tends to spoil before we can sort out how to prepare it.  But one of the fabulous things about GrubMarket is that since they have the GrubBox and individual produce to order, it’s easy to do a mix.  You can buy a box as often as you can handle the originality, and enjoy the surprise of discovering what’s in the box and learning about new fruits, and in between you can supplement with the things you already know and love (and know what to do with!).

Buy It/Win It

One of you gets to try it out!  Enter via the Rafflecopter widget below (see the bottom of this post for Propeller’s guidelines).  (If you’re on mobile, you might need to view on a “real” computer to see the widget.)  And whether you win or not, all of you can take 20% off your first GrubMarket order with coupon code GRUB20.

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Disclosure (in accordance with the FTC’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising”): Many thanks to Propeller Consulting, LLC for providing this prize for the giveaway. Choice of winners and opinions are 100% my own and NOT influenced by monetary compensation. I did receive a sample of the product in exchange for this review and post.

Only one entrant per mailing address, per giveaway.  If you have won a prize from our sponsor Propeller / FlyBy Promotions in the last 30 days, you are not eligible to win.  Or if you have won the same prize on another blog, you are not eligible to win it again. Winner is subject to eligibility verification.