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Why we sell vegetables and meat by the kilogram
Walk into any shop with a real counter and nobody asks you to buy a pack. You say how much you want, it goes on the scale, you pay for what is on the scale. That is the oldest transaction in food retail and it is also, for reasons that have nothing to do with shoppers, the one that online grocery mostly threw away.
Pre-packing exists because it is easier to pick, easier to scan and easier to ship. None of those three reasons is about the person eating the food.
Four of our eight aisles — vegetables, fresh fruit, the meat counter and the cheese cut from the wheel — are priced per kilogram, and you order the weight you want, whole or fractional. Here is what that actually changes.
You stop buying the difference
The gap between what a recipe needs and what a pack contains is the single largest source of food waste in a household kitchen. A soup wants two carrots; the bag holds a kilo. A sandwich wants eighty grams of cheese; the pack is two hundred and fifty. The excess is not free — you paid for it, and about a third of the time you will throw it away.
- A salad for two: 0.15 kg of baby spinach. Not a 300 g pillow bag, three quarters of which turns to slime.
- A weekday roast for two: 0.6 kg of pork neck. Not a tray of four steaks with two going into the freezer, unlabelled.
- A cheese board for four: 0.2 kg of aged gouda. Cut from the wheel that morning, not gassed in a tray a fortnight ago.
- A week of soup: 1.5 kg of carrots and 2 kg of potatoes, priced to the gram rather than rounded up to the next bag.
How the number works
The price on a weighed product page is the price for one kilogram. The quantity field takes fractions, so 0.5 is half a kilo and 0.25 is two hundred and fifty grams. The basket multiplies the two, and that is the figure you pay — there is no per-pack surcharge hidden behind it.
What we guarantee
- We weigh to within 30 g of your order.
- Where a piece cannot be cut exactly — a whole chicken breast, a wedge of hard cheese — we round down and charge the weight on the label.
- Every weighed item ships with its picked weight printed on it, so you can check it against the order before you put it away.
What you should do
- Order for the days you will cook, not for the week — loose produce keeps better than bagged, but it is still fresh food.
- Use the order notes: trimmed, butterflied, minced, thicker steaks. The counter reads them.
- Check the picked-weight label on arrival. If it is short, one photo is a refund.
The two habits worth changing
The first is thinking in packs. It takes about three orders to stop, and the moment it clicks is usually the first time you buy 0.3 kg of steak for one person and realise you have been buying two portions to eat one for years.
The second is storage. Loose produce is not washed and not sealed, and both of those are on purpose — an unwashed carrot keeps three weeks where a washed one keeps a week, and a sealed bag of spinach traps the ethylene that turns it to slime. Keep root vegetables cool and dark, keep leaves loosely wrapped in cloth, and never refrigerate a tomato.
Questions we get asked at the counter
Try one weighed order
Pick a vegetable, a fruit and something off the meat counter, and order the weight you would actually cook this week. Delivery is next day on orders placed before 14:00.
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