How much does Try the World cost per box?

The middle plan works out at roughly $65 a box for 13 to 15 items. The per-item cost is about $4.60, which is more than a supermarket multipack and less than a delicatessen. The cheapest price comes on a prepaid nine-month term; the most expensive is a single month with no commitment.

Can you cancel Try the World?

Yes, but check your term. Monthly plans cancel immediately. Prepaid terms (three, six, nine months) keep delivering until the term ends — you are not refunded for unshipped boxes, so the discount is a commitment, not a headline.

Is Try the World a good gift?

It is one of the better food gifts because it does not require guessing a single preference. The gift card lets the recipient pick their own plan and box size, which is safer than choosing one for them.

I ordered six Try the World boxes so you can see exactly what $390 of snacks looks like.

Six months of the Try the World snack box, opened and accounted for. What arrives, what gets eaten, what sits in the cupboard, and whether the subscription earns its place on the kitchen shelf.

RRavi MenonNovember 5, 20266 min read

The short answer. Six boxes over six months, $390 total, 84 items shipped. About one in seven went uneaten. The box is not cheap and it is not a rip-off. What it is, reliably, is a reason to eat something you would not have bought — and that turns out to be worth more than the per-item maths suggests, provided you open it on the day it arrives.

I have a habit of buying the same six things from the same aisle every week. You probably do too. The Try the World box is the only thing I have found that breaks that loop without requiring me to plan, research, or care. It shows up, I open it, and for twenty minutes the kitchen is somewhere else.

This is not a sponsored piece. I paid for all six boxes at the standard price. The affiliate link in the picks section below earns a commission if you buy through it, but it does not change what I am about to say, which is: the box is good with one specific caveat, and the caveat is about you, not the product.

What arrives in a Try the World box

The middle plan ships 13 to 15 items a month. Across six boxes, the average was 14. The items are small — a bag of gummies, a packet of biscuits, a bar of chocolate, a jar of something, a drink sachet. Nothing is full-sized. This is the point.

A typical box represents eight or nine countries, with one or two items from each. Over six months I saw snacks from Japan, Korea, Italy, France, Thailand, Mexico, Spain, Turkey, and Brazil. The country mix rotates — no two boxes had the same lineup, and no single country appeared in all six.

The unboxing card tells you what each item is and where it is from. This sounds like marketing and is actually useful, because without the card you would not know whether the honey cookie is Turkish or Greek, and the difference matters if you want to buy more of it.

The cost, broken down three ways

The headline price is "from $65 a box" on the middle plan. That "from" is doing work. Here is what it actually costs:

Per month, no commitment: $69 a box. This is the price if you cancel at any time.

Three-month prepay: $65 a box ($195 upfront). You save $4 a box but you are locked in.

Nine-month prepay: $59 a box ($531 upfront). The cheapest per-box price, but you are committing to nine months of snacks arriving on your kitchen counter.

I was on the three-month prepay for the first three boxes, then switched to monthly for the last three because I wanted to test whether the cancellation process was actually frictionless. It was — one email, no retention calls, no "are you sure" loop.

Fourteen items at $65 is $4.64 each. The same snacks bought individually in an Asian grocery in London would cost roughly $3 to $4. In a delicatessen, $6 to $9. So the box sits between the two, which is exactly where a curated discovery product should sit.

The thing nobody puts on the marketing page

Across six boxes, 84 items arrived. Twelve of them went uneaten. That is one in seven — a 14% waste rate, and every single uneaten item had one thing in common: it stayed in its wrapper.

Items that were opened and put on a plate were finished. Items that were opened and left in the cupboard were finished, eventually. Items that were never opened stayed in the cupboard for three weeks and then went in the bin.

So the real cost per eaten item was not $4.64. It was $65 divided by 12 eaten items, which is $5.42. That is the number to compare, and it is the number I have never seen on a subscription box landing page.

What the box is genuinely good at

It breaks a shopping rut. I am not going to start buying Korean honey cookies on my own. I do not know which ones are good, where to find them, or whether I will like them. The box removes all three barriers. That is its actual job, and it does it well.

It is a good gift. Food is the safest gift category because it does not require guessing a size, a colour, or a taste. A Try the World gift card lets the recipient pick their own plan, which is better than choosing a box size for someone else's household. I sent one to my sister for her birthday. She is still on the monthly plan eight months later, which is the strongest endorsement a subscription can get.

It gives you a reason to sit down. This is the part that sounds like copy and is not. The box arrives, we open it, we put things on a plate, and we spend twenty minutes talking about a biscuit from Puglia. That is a better Tuesday than the one we would have had, and I cannot name another $65 purchase that does that reliably.

What the box is bad at

Sweet things dominate. Across six boxes, the split was roughly two-thirds sweet to one-third savoury. If you are hoping for interesting cheeses, pickles, or cured meats, this is not that box. The savoury items were mostly crackers and one or two fried snacks.

The packaging is substantial. Fourteen individually wrapped items, a box, a card, an outer sleeve, and a marketing insert. It is recyclable in theory and a bin's worth in practice. If packaging waste bothers you, this category has not solved it.

It creates a small obligation. A box you have paid for is a box you feel you should finish. The cure is to give away what you do not want in the first week, not the fourth. By week four, an unopened packet is no longer a snack — it is guilt in a wrapper.

How to actually use the box

Open it the day it arrives. Put everything on a plate. Eat the strangest thing first. This is not a joke. The box is designed so that nothing in it is precious, and the failure mode is treating it as a cupboard rather than an event.

Buy the middle size. The small plan is a week of novelty. The large plan is a shelf of obligation. The middle is the one where you finish the box before the next one arrives, which is the only sustainable cadence.

Keep the tins. You will need them. Opened packets of foreign snacks go stale faster than you expect, and an airtight tin is the difference between "I will have that tomorrow" and "I forgot that existed."

Six boxes, ranked

I am not going to rank individual snacks because that is subjective and unhelpful. What I will say is that the box with the Korean honey cookie and the Turkish delight was the best, and the box with two packets of gummies and a savoury puff was the weakest. The variance is real. One box in six was noticeably better than the others, and one was noticeably worse. The other four were fine.

That variance is not a flaw. It is the nature of a curated box where the curator is working with what is available that month. If you want consistency, buy a multipack from Tesco. If you want surprise, buy the box.

Would I keep paying

Yes. I switched back to the three-month prepay after the monthly test, because the $4 savings per box is real money over a year and the three-month commitment is short enough to feel manageable.

I would not recommend the nine-month plan unless you have been on the box for at least three months and know you will eat what arrives. The discount is tempting and the commitment is long. Six boxes in, I am confident I will keep eating them. At month one, I was not.

If you are the kind of person who already cooks widely and shops at three different groceries, you do not need this. You are already doing the thing the box does. If you are not — and most people are not — it is a reasonable $65 a month for fourteen decisions you did not have to make, provided the plate comes out on the first night.

What we’d buy

Independent picks

1
Try the World snack box — middle plan
13-15 items from 8-9 countries, monthly delivery
Six boxes tested over six months. The middle plan is the sweet spot: small enough to finish in a week, big enough to feel like an event. Use the gift card option if buying for someone else.
from $65/boxShop at Try the World
2
Airtight storage tins, set of three
1 L, 1.5 L, 2 L, square, stackable
Opened packets go stale within days. A set of tins is what stops a third of the box ending up in the bin.
$25-$45
3
Small sharing plate, stoneware
22 cm, shallow, microwave safe
A box gets eaten when it is on a plate. It gets forgotten when it stays in the wrapper. This is not a metaphor — it is a behavioural fact I tested across six deliveries.
$18-$35

Prices are approximate and were checked when this piece was last updated. Buying through a link here may earn us a commission — it does not change what we recommend.

Questions people actually ask

How much does Try the World cost per box?: The middle plan works out at roughly $65 a box for 13 to 15 items. The per-item cost is about $4.60, which is more than a supermarket multipack and less than a delicatessen. The cheapest price comes on a prepaid nine-month term; the most expensive is a single month with no commitment.
What countries are in a Try the World box?: A typical box represents eight to nine countries, with one or two items each. Across six boxes I saw snacks from Japan, Korea, Italy, France, Thailand, Mexico, Spain, Turkey, and Brazil. The selection rotates, so no two boxes had the same country lineup.
Can you cancel Try the World?: Yes, but check your term. Monthly plans cancel immediately. Prepaid terms (three, six, nine months) keep delivering until the term ends — you are not refunded for unshipped boxes, so the discount is a commitment, not a headline.
Is Try the World a good gift?: It is one of the better food gifts because it does not require guessing a single preference. The gift card lets the recipient pick their own plan and box size, which is safer than choosing one for them.

Ravi Menon

Coffee & Kitchen Editor · London, United Kingdom

Ravi has made coffee in a office kitchen, a rented flat and one very small camper van, and writes about what actually survives those conditions. He is more interested in the water and the grinder than in the machine.

This piece is general information about everyday home and kitchen habits, not medical advice. See our health disclaimer.

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