We started doing Hello Fresh sometime around the turn of the new year, and for the most part we’ve really enjoyed it. They mail us the food to make three dinners a week, which greatly reduces the amount of grocery shopping that we have to do and has made for some interesting meals that we otherwise wouldn’t have tried to boot.

One intriguing side effect that comes from this delivery service is that every week I’ve got another couple of their giant ice packs to dispose of … and I’m pretty lazy about doing it, so admittedly what it becomes is every few weeks I have a whole lot of ice packs to dispose of! 

The technology they use is surprisingly simple – it’s this water-soluble gel that you just dump down the toilet, and I’ve actually been pretty impressed at just how long the stuff stays cold even after we’ve unpacked the food and I’m procrastinating taking care of the packing materials. If I get to it right away, it’ll still be frozen solid into bricks and once I dump them into the toilet in our guest room, it still takes another day or even two for them to thaw enough to fully dissolve and go down the drain.

Even a week later once it’s no longer solid, I still get cold hands handling the package to dump them out! Granted, at that point it might not be cold enough to keep meat at a safe temperature, but I just found it kind of fascinating to see an ice pack that could hold any semblance of cold that far after the fact.

I wish there was a way to somehow reuse the stuff, along with the rest of the packing materials – albeit that’s a different argument – because it almost seems sad to dump all of that icy slush down the drain … even if it’s fun to then flush the toilet and watch it slowly dissolve into the water until it’s thinned out enough to actually clear the drain!

…I’m just glad that we do have an extra toilet we can use to dispose of the stuff while we wait for it to break down… 😛