Organic Vegetables Delivered to Your Door – Reason2.be
Our first Organic Vegetable box from Reason2.be
There have been a lot more veggies in my life (and my belly) lately. After months of discussing it, Andrew and I signed up for a weekly produce box delivery service. Two weeks ago the first box of organic fruits and vegetables arrived at my door and I’m in veggie heaven.
Because we’ve been trying to eat healthier and more locally, I had been researching places to buy local produce in Brussels. It seemed like a veg box delivery company would be a good option, but there were surprisingly quite a few to choose from. After months of analysis paralysis, in the end, the veg box sort of chose me.
I noticed a huge sign, on the way into my gym one morning, for Reason2.be and I checked out their website when I got home. It was everything I was looking for in a veg box scheme and more, so I decided to give it a try.
One of the things I like about Reason2.be is they offer many options. Since there is only Andrew and me, we opted for the small fruit and vegetable box. There are also medium and large sizes, fruit only, veg only, a ‘favourites box’ and an ‘100% Benelux box.’
My first box contained:
- About 2lbs of carrots which became carrot and ginger soup
- A bag of Spinach which became spinach salad
- Green beans that I sautéed with parmesan
- 4 apples that turned into a baked apple dessert
- 4 pears that I had to wrestle away from Andrew so I could taste one
- Celery that was used in mushroom risotto
- And a small winter squash that we ate as stuffed squash last night
Most of box number 2 hasn’t been eaten yet but it included: oranges, pears, a cabbage, potatoes, a small head of leaf lettuce, some green peppers and that ubiquitous Belgian winter staple, chicon or Belgian Endive.
In addition to the produce, Reason2.be offers organic milk and eggs and has partnered with our butcher, Jack O’Shea’s, to offer free-range and organic meat boxes. We have opted in to the milk and eggs but for now we prefer to get our meat directly from Jack’s.
There are also a number of ‘sustainable services’ Reason2.be subscribers can opt into:
- They will pick up your glass and recycle it for you
- They will pick up letters and post them for you
- They have an English book lending library
- And a toy and game library
- You can borrow an energy monitor to track your home energy consumption
- And they will pick up and drop off your dry-cleaning at an eco dry-cleaner
You can use these services for .50€ (or 1.00€ for the dry-cleaning drop off) or subscribe to everything for 1.00€ a week. Reason2.be also collects used corks, plastic bottle tops, eye-glasses and printer cartridges for various charities. The boxes and packaging can be recycled each week so there is next to no waste.
If you’re in the Brussels area and are looking for an affordable and convenient way to get your hands on some organic, local produce, give Reason2.be a try.
Do you get a veggie box? I’d love to hear any experiences with Reason2.be or any of the other veggie box services in the area.
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Fantastic! I’ve been looking for a vegetable box as well, and was having a hard time finding one that really met our needs. Looks like I finally found one! Thanks!
Hi Amy and welcome to CheeseWeb! I hope Reason2.be works out for you. I’ve found them to be great so far and very adaptable to different needs. Stop by again soon!
This looks really good. In particular the bottle collection and the milk delivery sound fantastic. It’s fresh milk, right?
I’m not sure I can justify it when we live 10 minutes from an excellent market (and have a bottle bank on the way to the market!).
It would force me to learn some new recipes though… I’m tired of my current repertoire.
Sorry, just having an argument with myself in your comments box!!!
Haha, you sound like me Laura. I had the same debate as we live close to a market and butcher. However I find I don’t choose as many vegetables at the store as I should. This sort of forces me to use them. Yes the milk is organic as well (Yay no UHT!) and the eggs are free-range/organic. They also have a few recipes on the site but with the internet and my huge collection of cookbooks I’m finding it fairly easy to come up with ideas. Although after a few months of chicon, this may not be the case any more
I suppose I could always go to the market for items that I really fancied still. I’d probably end up just making loads of weird soups with the unknown box ingredients. Yummy, green bean and pear soup.
We Had a wonderful soup at the Boilerworks in Brunswick Square on the weekend. It was endive and bacon. Might be a way of using up some of that endive.
Ooo yum! I’ll have to look for a recipe. I loved Boilerworks when we went a couple of years ago. Great Martinis too
… you guys are amazing … when you aren’t out adventuring you get adventures delivered to your door … enjoy enjoy enjoy! … PP
It’s an adventure in a box!
Hi Alison!!
This is exactly what I needed right now… in two weeks I will start giving “solids” to my little one and was desperate for some good quality fresh stuff that will not require me to go very far to pick up. I started reading your blog when we first got here and it still delivers great ideas.
Thank you
Hi Niovi!
I’m so glad this was a good find for you! Reason2.be also have something called baby bio for little ones on their site. Not entirely sure what it is but certainly may be worth checking out for you. Thanks for reading and commenting. It’s great to know that CheeseWeb is helpful to others
I love this sort of thing, thanks for bringing it up!!! I know I enjoyed this type of thing a lot in Switzerland. I’m wondering if there are experiences from people that need to have the items dropped off inside an apartment building? How has that treated them?
One complaint I have here in North America is that the variety of veggies are always the same. It’s hard to find good veggies unless you find the small organic stores…
With this particular company you can leave instructions to have the box dropped off inside a building if you aren’t there. You can also arrange to pick it up yourself at one of several drop off points.
We were fairly lucky in Halifax to have a good weekend market for fresh veg, but I agree that the normal grocery store selection wasn’t great. I guess it really depends where you are and how much produce is available locally.
Hi Allison,
Great Post!
I have ordered as soon as I read your article and we have received our test one off veg and fruit box plus milk and eggs today.
The fruits, milk and eggs were looking great, however, to our surprise we discovered that the broccoli was inhabited by some tiny bugs (hope organic at least) that we are not willing to taste
I think I’m going to give it another shoot, since we are more interested in organic milk and eggs but its quite disappointing to receive something (while ordering for the first time) that is clearly not eatable whilst easily identifiable since it was not wrapped of any kind.
Anyway, I’m going to recommend this service to my friends.
Keep them coming
S
Yikes! Well I guess bugs are the downside of not being sprayed with as many chemicals. I was told about one person who was not happy about a particular order they received who contacted customer service. It was dealt with right away and they have had no more problems. I would send them an e-mail or call them with your complaint and I’m sure they will handle it.
This post came right in time for an increased need of vegetables and fruit. My boyfriend and I just bought a juice extractor and are planing to use lots of veggies and fruit. I already started checking out the webpage but I jsut though I’ll ask someone who’s already tried it. Do you think all the veggies and fruit are clean enough to eat with the peel on? Even though I know that most nutrients are right next to the peel I still take the peel off of all the stuff I buy in normal shops. Do you think this place will be different?
Thank you in advance and cheers!
The only things I really worry about in terms of the peel are root veg (which frankly you wouldn’t want to eat the peels of anyway). As long as you give your fruits a good scrubbing they should be fine.