If you love your coffee, subscribing to Bean Box is an excellent way to try out different blends from the comfort of your own home. Bean Box offers up a variety of different coffees, artisan treats, and premium chocolates for you or the coffee lover in your life.
What You Get From a Coffee Subscription
Coffee subscriptions allow you to experience the joys of the coffee house in your own kitchen. Bean Box specializes in artisan roasted coffees with sustainable and ethical sources. If buying quality beans from non-exploitative sources is essential to you, a coffee subscription can tell you exactly where your beans come from and the process of how they got to your coffee cup.
Of course, coffee subscriptions will cost you a little bit more than simply buying your beans from the store. But, to many coffee connoisseurs, it’s worth it. The actual value comes from the quality of the coffee and the peace of mind of knowing that the farmers are being treated fairly.
You also get a chance to try coffees from all over the world. You could discover new flavors and favorites to add to your regular coffee rotation.
What Is Bean Box?
Bean Box doesn’t roast its own beans. Instead, its panel of coffee experts partners with artisan roasters in and around Seattle, to find new and exciting coffees from all over the world. They select the best and put them in specially designed subscription boxes to ship out to coffee lovers weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly.
Bean Box also allows you to subscribe to a sampler of “coffee of the month” boxes that can introduce you to new varieties from all over the world. Bean Box lets you specify what you like in your coffee and tailors its boxes based on your preferences. You can also select different roasts to try out.
Ryan Fritzky and Matthew Berk founded Bean Box; software engineers turned coffee entrepreneurs. They use local roasters for optimal freshness and strive to craft the ultimate coffee experience for their consumers.
How Does It Work?
The first thing that you do is visit their subscription page, where you can start choosing your initial subscription. Options include their Bean Box Sampler, which gives you four 1.8 ounce bags of coffee or the 12 ounce featured coffee of the month.
After you choose what level you want to be at, it’s time to talk about your personal coffee preferences. Choose between dark, medium, light, espresso, and decaf roasts. If you opt for the sampler option, you can pay for six months upfront or set up recurring monthly payments. Coffee of the month is similar, although you can also pay for a year upfront.
You can also choose some specialty options, like a coffee and chocolate pairing, a tour of coffee around the world, or a holiday sampler. Costs vary for each option, and you can also choose the frequency of your deliveries, and you can skip, pause or cancel at any time. If you pause your subscription, you can always restart it at any time.
All of the coffee comes with a roast batch number and the date when it was roasted. They’re also marked with a unique QR code that lets you save your favorites for later ordering.
Bean Box Pros
There are plenty of reasons why Bean Box is one of the top coffee subscription options out there. But, if you’re a coffee lover who doesn’t mind paying a little extra for your beans, it could be a game-changer for you.
Bean Box Ships The Freshest Beans
Since Bean Box works with all local roasters, their beans are always as fresh as possible. All orders are shipped within two days of being roasted. You will definitely taste the difference between Bean Box coffee and what you get from your grocery store.
The Interface Is User-Friendly
Bean Box’s website is really easy to use, and it’s simple to alter or cancel your order at any time. You can also change your preferences to reflect new tastes or simply try out different flavors. You can also order on their website, mobile, phone app, or text Bean Box to place your order. The sheer convenience of the service is what sets it apart from a lot of other options and creates loyal customers.
Free Shipping On Certain Subscriptions
Bean Box knows how to reward its customers with free shipping on certain subscriptions.
Plenty Of Different Options
The team at Bean Box knows what it’s doing in terms of selecting the best coffees, and they provide plenty of different exciting options for their coffee connoisseurs. They also know how to expertly pair their coffee with other tasty treats.
You can find premium biscotti, teas, chocolates, and caramel candies on their website, to say nothing of the coffee itself. Bean Box has thirty different roasters located in the Pacific Northwest that they work with. These roasters specialize in different coffee varieties like Bourbon, Castillo, and Caturra and deep layers of flavor.
You’ll find notes of brown sugar, dark chocolate, and tobacco in their Diablo Dark Roast. The Johnson House Blend is an endlessly drinkable coffee with a faint hint of chocolate and toffee. It’s not as heavy as the Diablo Dark Roast, and it’s perfect for every day.
You can also discover coffee from all over the world, from Kenya to Colombia. These beans are fairly sourced and roasted with care so that you can get authentic flavors and peace of mind at the same time.
Bean Box Cons
Bean Box offers a free month trial for its services, but you still have to pay the shipping on it. After the first free month, the shipping cost of your subscription is rolled into the cost of the coffee itself.
Although there are plenty of ways that you can customize your preferences, Bean Box usually only has about eight options available for their monthly program. Some other coffee subscription services offer more options. In fairness, Bean Box’s coffees are all high-end options, and their team are experts at selecting the right roast for you.
Bean Box also tends to be on the more expensive side. While the product isn’t overpriced for what you’re getting, it can be prohibitive for those on a budget. Fortunately, Bean Box has plenty of incentives and discounted packages, and you can save big by signing up for a multi-month subscription. For example, when you opt for a six-month subscription, you save 20 percent.
The Importance of Ethically Sourced Coffee
Although you can easily get your coffee from a grocery store for a fraction of the cost of Bean Box’s coffee, buying ethically sourced coffee is a responsible way to consume your caffeine.
Buying ethically sourced coffee ensures that the local farmers are treated fairly and promotes good labor practices. Most times, you can trace the beans right back to where they came from. A lot of fair trade coffee also gives back to the community in the form of education and development.
Since a lot of coffee comes from the developing world, supporting sustainable practices can help you be a much better global citizen. Unfortunately, coffee tends to be an exploitative industry, and working with companies like Bean Box can help you minimize your contributions to unsavory practices.
It’s also an excellent way to minimize your environmental footprint. Fair trade and ethically sourced coffee tends to come from farms that have more environmentally kind practices. Pesticides and agrochemicals are not as prevalent. These farms also tend to be smaller operations that don’t disturb the local wildlife or animals.
At the end of the day, most people agree that artisan coffee just tastes better as well.
Is It Worth the Buzz?
Whether or not Bean Box is worth the buzz is a genuinely subjective call, but if you’re a coffee lover who cares about the planet and the well-being of local farmers, it could be a good choice. Not only does Bean Box support the local community in the Pacific Northwest, but they also help out coffee farmers from all over the world.
The taste of their coffee is second to none as well since they send out the beans within two days of their original roasting. They also know what they’re talking about when it comes to coffee, selecting the best roast for each customer’s preference.
Although Bean Box is more expensive than most store-bought varieties, they go out of their way to make the experience as seamless as possible. You can order online, through their app, or by text. They also offer special discounts and introductory offers to offset the price.
Since you can change your subscription at any time, you can always cut back if your financial circumstances change. In addition, Bean Box’s customer service and care is second-to-none, and they will certainly work with you to make sure that everything is moving smoothly.
Ultimately, as far as coffee subscription options go, Bean Box is one of the better options on the market in terms of selection, quality, and ease of use.
