Good Club

Look at my happy little Good Club face.

I’ve joined the good club Good Club and I’m here to tell you about it.

This is not a sponsored post, nor was I sent any freebies. This is just me, loving a thing.

I’ve always enjoyed buying in bulk. Growing up, my dad ran a school from our home so there were always at least 50 mouths to feed. We shopped in the Cash & Carry, where baked beans tins are bigger than your head. As a teenager, I didn’t have one box of tampons in my cupboard, I had 50. (Of course I’ve switched to a moon cup now.)

Now that I live in a household of two, enormous tins of beans are unnecessary and apparently the business of writing stories from a garden shed does not warrant a Cash & Carry account (I tried) but if the Damn Panic taught us anything, it was NOT to panic buy (don’t be that guy) but to buy kilos of nuts, seeds and 12 x trays of normal sized tins of beans, so that we can a) shop less often and b) eat when the supermarket shelves are empty, which is now a weirdly common occurrence. I mean, does anyone even remember what a safety net 2019 felt like, not that we knew it at the time?

Another result of the Pandy is that I started lots of subscriptions to small businesses. Veg from Riverford (like for like more expensive than the supermarket, but I’ll pay a bit more for organic, seasonal and plastic-free) Coffee from Exhale (1 cup of exhale coffee has the equivalent antioxidants as 1.8kg of blueberries or 55 oranges! It’s go-go juice!) Milk from Mighty Pea (Fortified with iodine! Don’t get me started on the wonders of iodine!) and Pip & Nut tubs from Pip & Nut (now in glass jars!) Most are delivered in carbon neutral vans, the others are delivered by Royal Mail, who are already doing the rounds… before anyone jumps down my throat for increasing the use of carbon guzzling vehicles.

So, Good Club.

What it is, is a bulk buy once-a-month club. You can buy over 70 products zero waste, such as nuts, seeds, dried fruit, oats, pasta, lentils, rice, granola, muesli, fabric conditioner and washing up liquid in returnable pots which are delivered to your doorstep (contactless). I love the next bit: decanting from their jars to mine. Don’t ask me why this is fun.

Demonstrating how to pour muesli from one container to another, in case you didn’t know.

Then you put all their empties back in their box, leave it on your doorstep and it’s picked up again the next morning (by carbon neutral couriers).

And here’s some I decanted earlier.

They also sell over 3000 products from sustainable brands such as Biona Organic, Mr Organic, Whole Earth, Sharpham Park and many more. The beady eyed will notice the tubs the zero waste products are in are plastic - but before you run for the hills, it’s recycled, it’s used over and over again by Good Club and when it reaches the end of its life there, it’s recycled again. Good Club did their research and concluded this was the most environmentally friendly option. You can read more about that on their website.

Membership to the very good club Good Club is £40 a year. With free delivery once a month and most products as much as 40% cheaper than you’d find them elsewhere, I calculate a bargain.

I no longer depend on supermarkets, although they still have their place, mostly when it comes to fake meat - have you tried M&S Plant Kitchen Posh Dog sausages? Best I’ve tried yet. Iceland No Bull Burgers? Amazing. Tesco Wicked Kitchen Meatballs? Scrumptious. Sainsbury’s Plant Pioneer Hot n Spicy Goujons? Lovely jubbly. The supermarkets are in competition to lure vegans and I love nothing more than going in, buying only vegan products and imagining their little profit calculators noticing that some customers only buy vegan and that they must keep developing and expanding their vegan range until we inevitably take over the world with our compassionate little ways.

Tub towers.

If you like a lot of beans in your cupboard, join the club. Here.