Wasteful Packaging: Knorr Selects Spinach & Artichoke Rice Sample from Well.ca

In mid August, I placed an order with Well.ca, a Canadian online shopping site that has many interesting products including food, vitamins, protein bars, a wide range of baby products, kitchen implements, etc.. I’ve been very pleased with the website so far (their customer service is excellent too), however, there is one aspect of ordering products from them that makes me a little annoyed. When one places an order, depending on how much one has spent, certain samples are offered. One does have the right to refuse the samples, but in this case, I took the sample offered which was a Knorr Selects Spinach & Artichoke Rice side dish.  I was pretty sure I wouldn’t like the dish, but it was free, and with a new baby in the house, a “10 minute” food item sounded like good emergency backup.

I received my order from Well.ca and found the sample. It was packed in plastic (Why? The packet the Knorr side dish comes in is very thick and foil lined with a plasticy sort of outer shell). This is not the first time I’ve received samples from Well.ca that have been overpackaged (one notable example was a Dare REALFRUIT Biscuit Strawberry with Yoghurt sample which was this little fruit bar that was wrapped in cardboard, had a paper coupon, and then a plastic wrapper around all of that). 

The Knorr sample came in a plastic package.

Upon opening the plastic wrap last night (in a fit of desperation of what to eat late at night after finally getting a fussy baby to sleep), I found not just this thick package, but also two different paper inserts. One of them was a large piece of paper with something about entering a contest for a $100 gift card (it didn’t specify what the gift card was for- I mean is it for Knorr products or something more general.  If it’s for Knorr side dishes, I doubt many people will waste the time entering- I certainly don’t have time) and the other was a coupon for more of this Knorr stuff.

When I opened the plastic package there was all of this inside.

My husband and I cooked up this monstrosity last night. The smell of the dry stuff was gross and it was even worse prepared. We tried to improve it by putting some fresh grated parmesan on top and lots of pepper and some salt, but it was unsalvageable and after a few bites we couldn’t eat anymore. Plus, if you’re looking for a 10 minute preparation time, look again. One actually has to bring it to a boil first, then time 10 minutes, then turn off the heat and wait at least another 5 minutes to let it thicken. Anyways, I generally don’t like packaged food and this certainly didn’t make me want to try anything by Knorr again. Bluck!

And Knorr should stop using so much packaging for a sample. This creates an incredible amount of waste. It’s unnecessary. My child’s generation is going to having nothing left but a pile of garbage if companies keep using so much wasteful packaging for all of their products including free samples. Well.ca, being a company focussed on wellness, should perhaps put some pressure on the companies that are sending samples to them to distribute to use less packaging for the “wellness” of the planet.

Overpackaging impacts us all. Now I’m left with a plastic wrapper, empty package, and two pieces of paper, all of which I will never use again and some of which I can’t even recycle.

So much waste.