After a nice long Green Week, let’s talk about snacks. Sure, you can order snacks from anywhere and have them delivered to your door, but two services make the process of getting healthy, tasty choices delivered regularly so easy it’s almost magical: Graze and Naturebox. Let’s compare the two.
The Contenders
Snack subscription services have a number of benefits. They can save you money, help you control your snacking by forcing you into a limited supply every month (as long as you don’t run off to the store and just buy more), and in the case of our contenders this week, offer you healthier alternatives to the stuff on your usual grocery store shelves. Of course, they also offer some interesting foods unavailable elsewhere.
If you’re not familiar with our two contenders this week—Graze and Naturebox, here are the basics:
Graze: Graze offers boxes packed with eight snacks each, starting at $12/box (you can downsize to four snack boxes for $7.) Those flat-pack boxes come packed with treats like their “herby bread basket” snack mix, “garden of England” dried fruit mix, and their “flapjacks”, which most of us would recognize as granola snack bars, mixed with fruit, nuts, chocolate, and other ingredients. You pay by the box, not by the month, which gives you the freedom to get one box a month delivered to your home or office, or get multiple boxes every month depending on how quickly you gobble up the snacks inside.
Naturebox: Naturebox offers boxes packed with either five or ten snacks in each box for $20/box or $33/box respectively. Naturebox boxes come full of their huge selection of snacks like their guacamole bites or asiago and cheddar cheese crisps, their simply smoky or honey bbq nut snack mixes, their spicy sriracha popcorn (and other popcorn mixes), along with a world of baked treats both sweet and savory (like biscotti bites, tea biscuits, and brownie-like snacks called “nom noms”), granola and snack bars, and even crackers and dips. Again here, you pay by the box, not by the month, and you can have your snacks delivered to your home or office, wherever you prefer.
These aren’t the only two subscription, direct-to-door snacking services available, but they are two of the most popular, and offer the widest variety of snacks for some of the best prices. If you’re looking into keeping healthier snacks around beyond just chips and candies, these two are good options to consider.
In many ways, Naturebox and Graze are more alike than they are different. They both offer referral programs for their customers (please don’t spam the comments with your referral codes), they both offer flexible options to pause and re-start your box subscription if you need to change addresses or just put things on hold for a while. They both offer snacks you probably won’t find in the grocery store, and you’ll get a decent selection and a modest size of snacks to choose from. Even so, if you had to choose between the two, there are a few things you should know.
Naturebox Gives You More for Your Money, but Graze Offers Simple, Portable Munchies
Your money goes a pretty long way when it comes to the snacks you get, but no one could look at these two services and not immediately see that Naturebox offers way more food for the money you spend—which is good because it’s the more expensive of the two.
Graze’s boxes are smaller, and while getting eight snacks instead of five for less money sounds enticing, Graze’s snack portion sizes are substantially smaller (even though they’ve increased them relatively recently), so you should expect to eat through one of your four or eight snacks in a Graze box probably at same time you open it (or pretty quickly thereafter.) Now, the portion sizes could be a good or a bad thing depending on your perspective. You’re spending less money here, so getting less food isn’t a huge deal. Also, Graze’s algorithm, in my experience, is pretty good at picking what you’d like—partially because they don’t really have a huge selection of snacks, and what they have is generally good stuff anyway. However, when I used Graze, I did find myself polishing off my box after a few workdays and wishing I had more—which made me think of ordering another box, which is obviously the point.
Naturebox, on the other hand, has resealable snack bags that are full of the snack you were shipped, and you can eat as little or as much as you like. Of course, you could polish off a whole bag of dark cocoa nom noms at once, and we won’t judge you for it, but you’ll probably feel pretty bad afterward—those bags aren’t that small, and your Naturebox box is designed to last for a pretty long stretch—probably several weeks. When I used the service (and full disclosure, we still subscribe to Naturebox in my household) I found one box of five snacks enough to last the month, and sometimes I’d have snacks left over by the time my next box arrived. Other times I’d binge watch something on Netflix and well, that’s where those snacks went.
Graze’s Algorithm Is Good, but Naturebox Has the Bigger, Broader Selection
In many ways, Graze and Naturebox both give you some control over what’s in your box. You can browse their options by category (nuts and snack mixes, popcorns, low sodium, vegan, and so on—Naturebox’s categories are more for people interested in choosing by ingredient and Graze’s are more for people interested in choosing by flavor or type.) Both companies promise to use simple ingredients free of junk and artificial sweeteners and additives. The big difference here isn’t so much in the food, but in how much control over it you have, and how much you get.
Graze uses a custom algorithm called “Darwin” to automatically fill your box with snacks the company thinks you’ll enjoy. They start that algorithm based on your rankings of the snacks on their site that you’d like to try (or alternatively, say you never ever want to eat), and your ratings of snacks you’ve gotten in your Graze box. That said, there’s little guarantee with Graze that you’ll get something you particularly want. Then again, you certainly won’t get something you dislike, and since the majority of Graze’s catalog is good stuff, it’s unlikely you’ll get something you rated as being willing to try but actually won’t enjoy.
Naturebox, on the other hand, gives you more control—which is ironic, considering Naturebox has a much bigger selection of snacks than Graze does, and they come in bigger snacking portions. You can sit back and let Naturebox select the snacks you get based on the things you’ve selected in the past, your ratings of available snacks on the site (or snacks you’ve tried), or you can get hands-on and choose every snack in your box based on what Naturebox has available that month in its catalog.
Personally, I’ve found Naturebox’s suggestions a little spotty, and prefer to make a ritual out of sitting down every month and choosing the next month’s snacks. That may or may not work for you and your household, but it’s fun for ours. We pore through Naturebox’s catalog and decide whether to stick with something we loved from the previous month or try something new. Similarly, Naturebox has been pushing into new snack options (both a good and a bad thing since their stock can fluctuate—one month they’ll have your favorite, then the next month it’s gone, and then the following month it’s back) with their “premium” snacks, which look tempting but cost more.
Everybody’s Food Is Delicious, and Their Customer Service Is Stellar
I’ll be up front here and say I’m not the pickiest eater. If a snack tastes good, I’ll eat it, and both Graze and Naturebox’s snacks are delicious. You won’t be disappointed with either. Of course, your palate may differ, so you should absolutely check out the snacks that Naturebox has in its catalog and the snacks that Graze offers as well to see which options sound the tastiest to you. Both companies offer new member discounts, and both companies make it easy to cancel.
The one ding I’ll give here goes to Naturebox, where I got a couple of snacks in one box that felt like they must have been at the back of a shelf somewhere and just didn’t taste fresh at all. That said, it was an isolated incident, and the following month’s box was great. With Graze, I never had an experience where I felt the food was sub-par or a little old—I just wished there was more every time I had some.
As for customer service, both companies have been responsive to inquiries or requests, eager to please if issues of any type came up, and willing to use the power of discounts and extra snacks to make their customers happy. Both companies operate a strong, active social media presence, so if you can’t get through to someone through their usual customer service channels, you can always ping them on Twitter and Facebook and expect to hear back from someone. In general, I never had a problem with either company that they weren’t able to either resolve or explain to my satisfaction.
The Verdict: Naturebox Takes the Prize, but Graze Is Great for Small-Snackers
At the end of the day, if your goal with a subscription snacking service is to replace your regular trip down the crappy chip and candy aisle at your grocery store, Naturebox is going to be the service that comes the closest to doing it. With it, you’ll have the best chance at actually weaning yourself off of chips, cheetos, and chex mix and onto healthier, more moderate (and modestly portioned) options that still taste good and come in packages big enough for you to enjoy happily and still have some left over for later. Oh, and did we mention that you can snag Naturebox snacks at some Target locations if you need a quick fix?
That’s not to diss Graze in any way though. If you’re a single snacker, just want something to nosh on while you work (which, to be fair, was Graze’s whole ideal—something to munch on while you work that wasn’t a bag of chips or something crappy from the office vending machine), or don’t really want to buy a bag of snacks to leave lying around and would instead prefer the smaller portions and hands-off approach to snacking that Graze offers, you can’t go wrong with them.
In both cases, the food is great, the customer service is great, and you’ll likely be happy with either option. Just make sure you choose based on the type of snacker you are. Personally, I like chowing down on a portion of Sriracha Cashews or some Guacamole Bites, seal up the bag, and then put them back in the cabinet for later, so Naturebox is the better option for me. If you’d rather open your desk drawer, take out a Protein Flapjack or a pack of Brooklyn Bites, and finish it right then and there, Graze might be better for you.
Photos by Kyle Brammer, porcupiny, Alan Henry, Kyle Brammer, Raevyn Wallace, Kyle Brammer, and Raevyn Wallace.