Status

Electricity

On

Communications

Infrastructure: Cell / 3G / Broadband Internet / Family Radio Service

Media: Twitter / Facebook / WordPress / e-mail / Wave / Blogspot

Heat

On, 68 degrees F

Hound

Actively wild with cabin fever

Inventory

OrangeSlices, Powerade Zero, Diet Coke, Sour Neon Crawlers, Gummy Worms and a ream of paper. All on a Pizza Nova Box with a tiny netbook in the background.

Always enticed by coupons, this week Melissa and I tag-teamed on ordering from FreshDirect. The grocery delivery service is heavily used around these parts, if the frequent street blockage by its refrigerated trucks is any indication. We’ve used FD’s supposedly excessive packaging as a convenient excuse to stick with our conventional loaf-at-a-time trips to the corner store. Ordering en masse has never sat very well with Melissa or I, because it requires list-making discipline, and we’d inevitably forget key items anyway. The promise of online management, however, coupled with a “new neighbor” 25-percent-off coupon, finally drew us in. (Plus, according to their commercials they’d addressed the packaging problem. Or were at least aware of it.)

Melissa built most of our list on their site Sunday evening, but because the previous occupants had been FD customers, Melissa was unable to use our coupon without calling customer service. That set us back 24 hours and enabled us to justify a dinner of frozen burritos. On Monday night, I finished and placed the order, selecting one of their two-hour delivery windows for early yesterday afternoon.

Our food arrived smack in the middle of the window: 1 p.m. The delivery person welcomed me to FreshDirect after lugging six containers up the stairs: three of the infamous FD boxes, one plastic bag and two cartons of Diet Coke. Two of the FD boxes, as you can see from the photos, were fairly snugly packed. The third had four items: two individual-sized yogurts, a pack of tofu and a pack of turkey dogs.*Too much packaging?

Well, it’s definitely more than a run to Gristedes generates, even when we (always) forget our reusable bags. Could they perhaps use semi-disposable containers like those USPS bins everyone steals? Or perhaps the driver could take the last load of boxes back when your next delivery arrives? They don’t currently, as per their FAQ:

Why are there so many boxes in my order?
FreshDirect was designed to be the perfect environment for food. We separate different types of food into 12 different climate zones to ensure the quality of our products. Our design for handling food has resulted in three separate assembly processes which create separate boxes for the following:

• Meat, Seafood, and Produce items packed together
• Dairy, Deli, Cheese, Coffee and Loose Tea items packed together
• Grocery and select non-refrigerated Produce (like bananas and tomatoes) packed together

The number of items in a box has a direct relationship to the number of items ordered from a given department. Sometimes, boxes may be packed with only a few items depending on what you have ordered. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and encourage you to recycle your boxes. Unfortunately, FreshDirect cannot currently pick up or re-use boxes.

I was able, fortunately, to fit everything except the 48 Diet Cokes into the kitchen’s crannies. (In TFH-South, I once made the mistake of driving up from NoVa with eight 12-packs of Coke, and we had to use them as a piece of furniture.) And one of their boxes is enough to serve as a temporary receptacle for our recyclable paper materials.

What’s the advantage besides the efficiency of a full cart’s worth of groceries and the utility of searching aisles electronically? I’m not sure just yet. Our coupon savings aside, we’ll have to do some comparison shopping on the items we buy all the time (frozen pizza, cereal, peanut butter, jelly, bread, ice cream) to see how it shakes out.

Totaling up this grocery run, though:

*Vegetarian-chili-turkey-dog casserole, anyone?

If you’ve got a couple minutes to kill, here’s video (me unpacking groceries is definitely safe for work):

The 100 Cereal Taste Test [NY Mag]