Who’s Buying and Selling Artfully Folded Ham on Facebook?

How much would you pay a stranger to twist some lunch meat into the shape of a rose and deliver it to your house? More important: Would you pay a stranger to twist some lunch meat into the shape of a rose and deliver it to your house? Regardless of your own preferences, there are plenty of people who would pay for such a service. They’re called “graze boxes”—takeaway containers filled with meats, cheeses, crackers, and fruits—and they’re all over Facebook Marketplace, selling from as little as $10 to as much as $100.

The grazing trend started in earnest on Instagram—here, tables laden with plateless yards of converging snacks first became popular in 2018, and those who formed businesses in this initial boom would go on to boast clients such as Tom Hardy and Kendall Jenner. But then the Covid-19 pandemic hit, and very few people got married or threw a PR event or lavishly celebrated a milestone birthday (at least, not publicly), and they certainly didn’t do it with a big, everyone-get-your-fingers-in spread. Enter the graze box, the same artfully arranged array of nibbles and pickles you’d find on a grazing table or platter, but in a handy container delivered to your door.

For buyers, graze boxes were perhaps a nice way to bring the fun of a low-key cocktail party into their homes while stuck in confinement; for sellers, they were an innovative solution to the brief hiatus in catered events. Naturally, then, they inspired a flood of copycats on Facebook.

Search “graze box” on the social networks’ commerce hub and you’ll see plenty of inoffensive offerings—perhaps slightly less artfully done than boxes created by professionals, but appetizing enough, and inspiring in their entrepreneurial spirit. Yet you don’t have to scroll far for things to become bizarre. Why are those strawberries on top of that salami? Why is half a kiwi nestled next to those tortilla chips? Why exactly is all of this food laid out inside a pizza box? And does anyone really want to pay $8 for four shop-bought muffins, a small jar of jam, and a couple of candy canes?

Search “sweet box” on Facebook and you’ll find an even greater range of offerings—from personalized boxes of chocolate bars to random assortments of candy haphazardly thrown on top of tissue paper. Searches for “afternoon tea box,” “breakfast box,” and “munchie box” produce similarly varied results, some more alarming than others.

The Facebook Marketplace snack box trend is now so big in Britain that it has irritated Mumsnet and Reddit users alike. “In the past month iv [sic] had at least 8 people try talk me into buying a cheese board off them, I don’t even like cheese,” wrote one woman on the mothering forum in October. Her post inspired many responses, ranging from the horrified—“those grazing boards look horrendous”—to the bemused: “Who is buying these?? It’s just a bunch of stuff you can get cheaper at [supermarkets].” On the subreddit “Ask UK,” a “flummoxed” user flagged the Facebook trend last February, while another commenter responded, “Someone bought me one for my birthday in January. Was terrible. Shite homemade sandwiches, stale scones, repacked biscuits and relatively ok brownies. I hope the sender didn’t pay more than a [dollar] for it, was so, so bad.”