Graze April 2016 Review + Free Trial Box

Graze is a weekly snack subscription box that delivers either 4 or 8 snacks to your home. Snack possibilities include nuts, dried fruits, chips, flapjacks, dippers, soups and more. There are over 100 different concoctions to choose from! Each portion-controlled serving is the perfect pick-me-up for an afternoon at work or at play.

Graze employs an in-house team of experts to develop their recipes. They regularly source their ingredients from small suppliers dedicated to producing the best, tastiest products around. Graze chefs even tried 29 different varieties of raisins before finding the perfect one for one of their recipes!

While you have the opportunity to specify dietary preferences during the set up process, Graze is not safe for those who suffer from food allergies; all of their products are produced in the same facility. Still, if you’re going gluten-free but don’t have celiac disease, for instance, and you feel comfortable potentially exposing yourself to trace amounts of gluten, this subscription would be ideal for you!

Graze makes it very easy to isolate those snacks that are unsuitable for vegetarians, vegans, those avoiding gluten, dairy and soy. They also make it easy to avoid snacks containing nuts, bananas, chocolate, cranberries, pineapple and raisins. With one click you can throw out both snacks that require a microwave and those that are spicy.

Once you specify generally the categories of snacks you’d like to avoid, you can go to the “Our Food” tab to preview a list of available snacks. Here you can place each snack into one of four categories: trash, try, like and love. Once you do that, Graze’s Darwin algorithm generates a box to send out that is tailor made for you! Or, if you’d prefer, you can specify boxes according to nutritional content, including carb counting, calorie counting, sugar counting and high protein boxes.

Although the set up process is time consuming, it was a lot of fun. It left me excited to see what Graze would send.

This month, Graze sent me the following snacks: Garden of England, Triple Berry Smoothie, Chocolate Pecan Pie, Peachy Orchard, Summer Berry Compote with Wheatmeal Shortbread, Vitamin E Defense, Eleanor’s Apple Crumble and Anytime Energizer. I can’t wait to try them!

The Garden of England is a mix of mini strawberries, soft apple pieces and black currants. It was quite yummy–certainly better than the food actually served in England! While the blackcurrants were my least favorite of the three ingredients, they did provide a nice tart contrast to the sweetness of the strawberries and apples.

Eleanor’s Apple Crumble was divine. It’s a good thing Graze delivers snacks one serving at a time, because I could have easily downed 20 servings in one sitting. The cinnamon honey almonds were outstanding. The apples and raisins offered a nice textural contrast to the almonds, while also offering a depth of flavor to the snack as a whole. Yum!

The Vitamin E Defense snack is a nutritionist pick that’s full of hazelnuts, peanuts, cranberries and raisins. As such, it’s packed with vitamins and minerals, and it tastes great! It’s very simple and straightforward, and would make an ideal hiking snack. It’s soft and crunchy and just plain yummy. I decided to eat it for lunch.

The Triple Berry Smoothie is soft, chewy and sweet. The berry flavor has even overtaken the soft, chewy bananas here! This was a win for me, but I’ll save what remains of the snack to have for dessert.

The chocolate pumpkin pie mix contained pieces of chocolate fudge, pecans, dates and vanilla-coated pumpkin seeds. When eating all components together, I did pick up on the chocolate pumpkin pie (the dates are interesting here; they mimic the crust part of the pecan pie that holds the pecans together). I enjoyed this together more than I did separating it into individual components.

This new snack, Peachy Orchard, was my favorite of the bunch. Comprised of peach drops, rhubarb and pear, its peach flavor brought me back to Georgia. So good! These did not last long.

The Anytime Energizer is a combination of cherry, pear and walnuts. Another nutritionist pick, it’s chock full of vitamins and minerals, and it’s delicious too! When I added it to my lunch, it was the first to go.

I enjoyed this Summer Berry Compote with Wholemeal Shortbread cookies very much. The berry compote was light and tart. The cookies had the texture of shortbread. This made for a nice dessert.

I thoroughly enjoyed this month’s snack selection based on my inputs into the Darwin algorithm! I look forward to seeing what the algorithm will send next month. In the meantime, I’ll update my preferences: summer berry compote–like, Garden of England–like, Chocolate Pecan Pie–like, Triple Berry Smoothie–like, all others–love!

You can try your first Graze 4-count snack box free with this link – no coupon code required! You’ll pay $1 shipping for your first box. Adjusting the frequency (or canceling) is easy right from your account.

Visit Graze to subscribe or find out more!