All of you know that I am a girl that LOVES to try out new things. As well, I am all for convenience and making my weekends less hectic. There is nothing I hate worse than spending my entire weekend running from store to store to get everything I need to prepare my healthy meals for the next week. As well, I have learned along the way that I can power cook with the best of them and I am willing to spend half my Sundays making all the yummy food I need for the week (even sometimes doubling my batches for friends). What I CANNOT do is go to three stores on Sunday morning trying to save a few bucks or get everything I want for a recipe & to restock my inventory and THEN have to go back to the house and work for hours in the kitchen preparing it all. IT IS JUST TOO MUCH!
So, in an effort to cut my trips to the store in more than half, most of you know that I have a commercial freezer that stores six month’s worth of organic meats and frozen veggies- any of those items I am pretty much set with at all times. What I still have to shop for are things like dressings, fresh eggs & dairy, fresh veggies and fresh produce. I usually spend about $100 a week on those items alone. Let’s face it- eating healthy can get expensive. However, in the scheme of things I would rather invest money into my health over anything else at this point. Of course I still have to do the monthly Costco run for paper towels, toilet paper, organic tomato paste and things like that. It also gives me an excuse to browse the endless isles of home decor, kitchen appliances & cookware and all the other wonderful things I LOVE at Costco (I will save that rant for another post). What I don’t like about traditional grocery store shopping (at least here in the Buford area) is the selection of organic produce.
Sam and I made the decision to shop organic about eight months or so ago. We read up on the effects of chemicals and GMOs on your health and we felt that if we were going to be spending money to eat healthy and to try to do what is best for our bodies- we may as well spend the extra effort and money to do it right. That meant no chemicals on our food and to only eat hormone free, organic and clean meats and dairy as well. While it is more expensive to eat this way, I will say that on occasion we do have to give in and buy things that don’t meet all the requirements. We do try to practice these rules as much as possible and eat this way a good 80% of the time. I will admit that our selection in stores has made it quite a challenge doing so up until now. You may be able to find a few organic items at our traditional grocery stores, we often find that we cannot ever get everything on our list at one store AND stick to the organic and non GMO rule! For this reason, I branched out to look for alternative grocery options.
I have been using the www.naturesgardenexpress.com delivery service for the past few months. I usually had a standing order of a large mixed box (veggies and fruits) and it ran me about $80 each week. The main challenge with this is that the food is only delivered on Tuesdays and I have to remember to make my exchanges online before Monday at 10am. As well, there are some weeks that I just don’t need delivery (like when I am travelling or we are going out of town). It is kind of a pain to have to remember to go in to the system and put your account on hold so that you won’t have a new order created. It takes quite a bit of planning on my part and these days my life has been so chaotic I just need EASY. So, I decided to give a new service a try in hopes that I could literally at a spur of a moment (when I have 20 minutes of free time in the week) go online and order what I need and have it show up in a day or so. This is how I operate best. Since I cook on Sundays, it helps me to have my food in my fridge by Friday or Saturday at the latest so that I can plan out my menu and have it all done by Sunday night. Life is too crazy for me otherwise! I NEED EASY…
I had heard the commercials for www.coldlife.com for several months now (on my lovely hour and 30 minute drive each way to my office). I had also seen some trucks with the logo on it. I decided to check it out and see if they deliver to my area. I was happy to see that they did! Their website was really easy to navigate and it was pretty clean and easy to figure out how to create an account. Unlike the www.naturesgardenexpress.com site- there was no confusion on how to set up your order and what you need to do to get service. It was just like ordering a book on amazon. I will say that I wished that some of the dairy and other products would show the nutritional labels of the food so that I can see if it is something I would want to try. I don’t eat yogurt or anything with more than 5 grams of sugar as a rule of thumb and because of this I was not willing to risk ordering any of that on the site since I could not see the label. NOTE TO THE FOLKS AT COLD LIFE- Make a picture of the labels and put them on the site so we can read them! I am busy and won’t take the time to go to the company’s website to review them for sure. đŸ™‚
Once I ordered everything I received a confirmation email letting me know what the approximate total would be. The shipping was a flat $4 which would be worth it if I did not have to drive to several stores. As well I was able to find MOST of the produce and veggies that I wanted for the week.
So, here are the results from my first experience:
Ordered everything at 3:30pm on Thursday Nov 6th, order arrived at my door at 9:30am Friday November 7th.
The Good:
- Turnaround time is awesome
- The prices were competitive
- The delivery man was well dressed and very nice
- The quality of the food looks great
- The packaging was well done and the food was cold.
The Bad:
- Fuji apples, Butternut squash and Romaine lettuce were marked “out of inventory” on my packing slip and were not in my boxes
- When I go to the website to check on status of these items, their systems are behind telling me it has not been delivered yet???
Overall Experience:
Good experience I guess- I would rate it a 3 out of 5. However, in saying that- I’d rather know at the time order is being placed what they are missing! As well, they should get a better system that is real time if they want customers to know the status of their orders.
Unfortunately for me I had already ran by Kroger last night (I needed to pick up a prescription anyway) so I was able to get a few things I couldn’t get at Cold Life. Now I guess I will have to make an additional trip to the store to get the additional romaine lettuce, butternut squash & the fuji apples. Kind of bummed about that!!! Last thing- SPINACH was not anywhere to be found on the site! How can you not sell organic spinach? Weird. Hope this helps ya’ll!
Have a Happy, Healthy Friday everyone!