Triathletes have to eat. It’s a simple fact that we need energy to ride for 7 hours, run hill repeats and swim one-armed drills in the pool. This can come from your race and training nutrition, but if you’re not fueling properly for your daily meals, you’re already behind.
What’s a triathlete parent of 2 working full time with a full time working spouse to do when it’s time to drop some change at the local grocery store? It can be so time consuming to load everyone up, properly budget and make sure you don’t grab too many goods to exceed your budget. Lets not even go into all the crud that food producers seem to be filling our guts with these days in the non-natural food market and processed foods.
If you’re in the wealthy bracket, maybe you can pay someone to go to the store, get the all-organic grass fed goods and the budget is not a concern. But, like the majority of those toeing the line at the Ironman triathlons, you work within a time and money constraint.
Wouldn’t it be nice if a service would deliver your food to your door and it was actually healthy and natural? Wonder no more as we got in touch with Door to Door Organics (www.doortodoororganics.com) that does just that.
We personally have used the service off and on, and we wanted to see what we could do if we tried to use them for the bulk of our weekly grocery shopping.
They agreed to give us a store credit in exchange for giving them a whirl and letting you know how it worked out. read on below about our experience with the Kansas City Door to Door Organics organization.
Packaging / Shelf Appeal / Marketing
With D2D, there’s no shelf shopping. It’s all online. The site is pretty straight forward and easy to use.
They have an active Facebook and Twitter page which they keep up with and interact with clients.
When the products arrive to your door, it makes you wonder how they will keep goods fresh until you get home from work to get the boxes inside. It’s clearly marked in a D2D box delivered in a D2D truck. You can’t miss it.
The boxes are all new, never crushed, sealed completely, packed with wrapping, bubble wrap and refrigerated items are wrapped with frozen freezer packs. When you tear into your box, it’s obvious that someone put time and effort into packing and thinking about how to best to present your order.
Fashion / Appearance
The overall impression of D2D is professional. It’s not a fly-by-night outfit and they know what they are doing. Even their delivery trucks are decked out with sharp branded graphics.
Now, here’s where some shortfalls may appear with the products. D2D is an organic based produce provider. Yes, organic is healthier, but those healthy food items are sent without the use of pesticides and preservatives. What does that mean? It means you need to eat the perishable food fast.
There were a few instances of a withered lettuce leaves, a squishy grape tomato or two and maybe a bruised banana upon delivery. That’s easily addressed by contacting D2D and they will gladly credit your account for those items that did not arrive in pristine condition.
But, for everything that came in good shape, the clock is ticking. It’s GREAT food fresh, but you will need to consume most of the organic perishable items that cannot be frozen within days of the shipment arriving.
Fit / Function
The delivery date and time is set every week. You have until two days before to change your order and then you know when to set your old box and packing contents out to receive your next shipment.
Our store credit filled 3 medium boxes. That’s probably on par with a standard trip to the local grocery store for our family of 4. See the order form for what all we were able to get with the credit we received. We started with the small mixed fruit and veggie box and changed some items and added items that we would use at our house. Some items were perishable and some were not.
If we wanted to, we could have easily added anything that we would normally find at any grocery store. We opted to stay within the credit given and add items that matched the price we would find at the store in person. Some items were a little more expensive than we could get at the store, so we opted to leave those for in-person shopping trips.
You could sign up for an auto delivery of a mixed, fruit or veggie box and just go with whatever D2D was sending for that week and what was in season at the time. All you would need to do is sign up, pick your box, give payment info and auto ship. You could log on and change some items, but if you just left it alone, D2D would deliver your box of groceries every week or every other week depending on your selection. Basically pick it and forget about it. Without doing any more, you would get a weekly supply based on your initial selection. For a family that goes through lettuce, bananas and apples like they were going out of style, this was a nice option.
A shortfall of the auto delivery is that you will need to remember to adjust your order 2 days before delivery if you want to substitute any items, or you’ll have to accept what is the default food selection. You also would be in a jam if you used up your food supplies before the next weekly shipment. In order to keep costs affordable, D2D only delivers once a week and the standard is not to have random deliveries outside of that window. Families could go D2D exclusively, but there might have to be a few in-person store visits to bridge between deliveries.
As you can see from some of the pictures, we used anything from corn to potatoes to feed our family with healthy meals, trying to avoid as many meals-in-a-box situations as possible. D2D really provides anything you could want to cook at home for every meal.
Cost
Some prices on the shelf of your local market may be a little less than what you find on D2D, but when you take into account time and transportation to get to the store, you might very well break even.
This review was conducted with a $100 credit to the site, which we used and spent a few dollars more to complete the order. The three boxes of goods received would fill a normal shopping cart around half full. For our family, that’s about on par with the grocery trips adding up to around $200 a week for a family of four with two young children.
Added value comes in saved time not hassling with the stores and packing the family to go to the store. Sip some tea, make a protein shake and let D2D deliver the food to your doorstep.
Final thoughts
The concept of D2D is great. Just fire it up on the web, make your order and wait for a weekly delivery. It’s almost like Christmas. But, with fresh organic food, there is a time limit. You’re not going to able to store perishable foods that omit preservatives for too long before they become inedible. For our family of 4, it wasn’t really an issue to use up all of the food within 3 to 4 days. Even if you get a bad batch of lettuce or carrots, you can rest assured that D2D will take care of you with a credit for the next delivery.
The fruits and veggies are of equal quality to your whole foods or those stores with superior produce quality. You can get most anything you would get in person at stores, but there will be some cost increases. The trade off them becomes convenience. What’s your time worth? Like a lot of busy people, triathletes have short supplies of free time. D2D might just be the way to find an extra 45 minutes to an hour every couple of days for a few hill workouts or core training sessions.
* Writer's note - Door to Door Organics provided a $100 credit for an order for this review at no cost to the reviewer and did not influence this review.
Ryan Falkenrath is devoted family man balancing faith, family, Triathlon Coaching and racing. He is a certified USAT Level 1 Triathlon coach (www.SetThePaceTriathlon.com) and has formally raced endurance events since 2001 from 5k’s to Ironman distance races.
Ryan is racing Ironman Chattanooga in 2014 to raise funds for Ride to Give and Mended Little Hearts. You can follow his adventure on Facebook at Tri for a Hand Up, give to his Fundrazr campaign (), read more of his writing at Endurance Sports Examiner follow him on @TriJayhawkRyan or email him at [email protected]