Central Perk: The Graze Box – An Employee’s Survival Kit

marți, 16 septembrie 2014

The Graze Box – An Employee’s Survival Kit

Posted: 16 Sep 2014 02:05 AM PDT

I have to admit, I am a bit of a sucker for a free trial or a free gift. I am also the type of person who never stops being hungry and who cancels their free trial just before the 30 days are up. Until now, I think I’ve found one I won’t be cancelling.

The Company

Originally started by 7 friends who love food and wanted more from snacking, they began inventing snacks that showed off healthy eating’s more pleasurable side and working out the best way to get snacks to their customers.

With a kitchen in London, their team of snacking inventors are forever busy coming up with new and inventive, tasty ideas and have so far created over one hundred snacks.

Their motto – "Healthy snacks delivered straight to your door". And they do exactly what they say on the tin, or should I say box? A healthy snacking company that has been around for a couple of years now after exploding onto the food scene, bang on trend when the world was starting to question where their food came from.

How does Graze work?

In a nutshell, Graze is a selection of snacks that are delivered right to your work or home. You receive a box in the post with four well branded plastic containers of randomly selected snacks. There is a variety of food ranging from small puddings to seeds and flapjacks. They are also the only snack delivery business that offers dips with their snacks, like their incredible Salsa Fresca snack.

The Graze Website

The Graze website has a remarkable amount of options for a simple product. The main thing Graze has going for them? The choice of 100 different and yummy snacks. Once you receive your randomly selected snack box, you can rate how much you like it. Or simply navigate around the site to review their products before you’ve even received your box in the post.

You also have powerful control over the delivery frequency of your snacks. Navigation through the site is handled through the main menu at the top of the screen and it's probably where you would spend 90% of your time on the site. Unless you're like me and just want to browse through rows and rows of mouth-watering food!

The Menu

When you enter the site through the homepage (and you're logged in) you can see a list of categories on the left, some foods that have been sent to you recently, others that haven't. The main images on the homepage display what you have ordered recently and this is an easy way for you to rate the snacks that you've received.

Your Food Preferences

Graze has a simple to use rating system that will allow you to control the content of your boxes.

Graze Rating buttons - Bin, Try, Like, Love, Send Soon

Graze's food preference system works on four levels. Bin, Try, Like and Love. If you really want an item, click 'Send Soon' and Graze will do their best to get it to you in one of your next deliveries. If you didn't have time to set all of your preferences during signup, you can access this again from your control panel in your account under 'Your Snacks'. You can also adjust your ratings based on deliveries you receive. If you receive something that was on your 'try' list, and you end up loving it (or even hate it) you can rate the product accordingly.

When I used Graze the first time I went through to the snack categories on the left of the homepage and went through their snacks to see what they offered. It was at that time I rated the food – it was just me trying to save time in the future (and being nosey). When I had binned some of the items, Graze had noticed that I was eliminating certain foods with Almonds in and asked if I wanted to bin everything with Almonds in. This shows Graze has some sort of clever algorithm, making the menu selection just that bit easier!

Also on the food menu are three filters that allow you to list items based on your religion / dietary requirement. These include Non-Vegan, and Non-coeliac. Each of these areas has a quick button to bin all foods in that group so you dont have to search through every group to remove individual items. Clever eh?!

Getting your Graze Box

Deliveries is your second most important tab. From here you can control the frequency and destination of your Graze boxes. The centre screen shows your previous deliveries (as well as any that are currently being prepared), with the right displaying three tabs 'Holidays', 'One-Off boxes' and 'Your Weekly Boxes'. From this screen you can view / rate previous boxes, manage your upcoming deliveries and their frequency, tell Graze when you're on Holiday and wont be wanting your boxes, order single boxes, or manage your reoccurring deliveries.

Graze – Your Last Boxes

From here you can view all your previous boxes, as well as any boxes that are being prepared by Graze. You can view the contents of each box by clicking 'What did I get?', you can share the contents of this box on Facebook and Twitter, or you can send feedback to Graze about the box and its contents.

Your Holidays

From here you can schedule breaks in your Graze Deliveries by telling Graze the dates when you'll be away From and Until. This way no food will be sat in your mailbox while you're sunning yourself on a beach. This is also useful for scheduling occasional breaks from your Graze Boxes.

Your One-Off Boxes

From this section of the website you can tell Graze to send you a single box without creating a reoccurring delivery.This is useful should you need that little extra on a certain day, or just want to sample a different type of box.

Your Weekly Boxes

This is where you are able to control your deliveries and the frequency in which you receive your box. When you create a new reoccurring delivery it is automatically set to 'Weekly' for frequency. You can change this to 'Every two weeks' once you've initially set it up. Graze also allows deliveries to multiple addresses (I’ve recently set my Nibblebox to to be delivered to work and my breakfast box to my home address).

If at any point you decide to cancel your Graze Deliveries, you just need to remove your Weekly Boxes from here and your deliveries will stop.

Creating an account

So now you’ve taken a look around the site, how do you sign up? Creating your account is simple, all you have to do is press the ‘get started’ now button. There’s loads of them dotted around the site! It’s an email and password kind of thing and you select the type of box you want to receive, you have a choice of light snacks (low calorie), the breakfast box, nibblebox… the list goes on! I started with the nibblebox and then signed up for a breakfast box to be delivered as well!

Once you have your account basics set up, you then choose how often you want to recieve your box, monthly, fortightly or weekly. And then hey presto! Your 1st box is delivered to you as and when you requested it.

My Final Thoughts

I am so obsessed with this snack delivery service. The only downside of the product? I eat it all in one go because it always looks to good! My recommendation for the site though would be to offer different package types for customers. For example, a basic account would be 4 snacks, Silver package 6 snacks and a Gold package would be 8. All with different pay monthly charges. It just allows another option for the customer to customise their box.

One thing I have noticed is that there is no easy way to delete your Graze account. You can stop all deliveries and subscriptions in your account settings however I feel there needs to be an easier way for customers to cancel their account. A ‘delete account’ option in the drop down navigation from the account holders name would fit nicely and offer customers an easy route to delete their account.

Additionally, I want to take the time to mention their branding. I think they have it spot on. It’s unique, it looks quirky and contemporary but also has an ‘earthy’ edge. Do you like their branding? Have you used a snack delivery service? I’d love to hear your thoughts!

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