When I purged gluten from our kitchen, I had to give away all of our plastic tupperware. I planned to replace it with glass to be healthier and to make reheating food at work more convenient since I normally transfer my food to a bowl before microwaving. It took me about 8 months to finally settle on a few sets with some prices that I can stomach here. (Spoiler alert, it’s still a lot more expensive than anything available in the US.)
Without Amazon or Target, it’s sometimes hard to find quality kitchen items for a reasonable price here. You can get a lot of things from Migros or Coop, but often the quality or choice is lacking. There were hardly any glass containers like Pyrex available or they were very expensive or mostly round-shaped. I even searched in Globus and Manor and didn’t really find anything suitable. Honestly, I just wanted something like a Pyrex value set below, but Pyrex Europe does not offer sets, especially at these prices.
($29.99 from World Kitchen. I cannot express what a fantastic deal this set would be here!)
We do all of our cooking on weekends and then I portion half the food into lunch containers and the rest into bigger family-style containers to keep at home, so I was looking for a mix of big and small containers, with more small ones for transporting food to work. Moreover, I also wanted containers that fit well in my cooler lunch bag because they need to stay cool during the two hours I’m at the gym and traveling to work. Ideally, I wanted to be able to pack four containers or two containers and yogurt/fruit as I can now.
Even though I found (and bought) one kind of large Pyrex dish with a lid from Migros since de-glutening the kitchen, I resigned myself to the idea that finding a whole set would be difficult here. I began searching for Pyrex alternatives because there was no way I would pay 20-45CHF per container and the smallest Pyrex available was anyway not small enough to fit well in my lunch bag.
(59.95CHF from Pro Idee)
Lock&Lock is a fairly big brand here and I was very interested in their individual products from Globus. I thought maybe if I found a set online that it would not be quite so expensive as the one off pieces. Nobody wants to pay 15-40CHF for one container, but 60 for a set of five was starting to sound like a good deal
I would have gone ahead and gotten the Lock&Lock set, but the three smallest containers were all square, which is not as space-friendly to my cooler as rectangles would be, so I didn’t stop my search there. After finding Lock&Lock on Toppreise, I was able to do searches for “Boroseal”, “Borosilicat”, “Frischhaltedosen glas” and similar to find several more brands, sets and value options available in Switzerland.
Emsa was a brand I had never heard of, but they popped up in my searches with several affordable sets.
After I found the Emsa sets, I somehow found this Silit set. We have a Silit knife from my MIL that’s awesome, so I know the brand is good.
This set from Birgitte St. Gallen looked like one of the most affordable, but it was still square and the site needed a minimum order of 50CHF, which would mean ordering two sets. Plus shipping was a little more expensive than the Erwin Müller site.
(39.90 from Birgitte St. Gallen)
Likewise, this set from Weltbild was also relatively cheap but the sizes were actually a little too big for my needs compared to the Silit containers. Apparently I really had a specific size in mind for my lunch containers!
(39.95CHF from Weltbild.ch)
Lastly, I heard that IKEA has some offers for cheap containers and they do, but unfortunately the smallest size (sizes are not accurate in the picture!) was square and the smallest rectangle container was also too big.
(Individually, 2.95-7.95CHF from IKEA)
I really like Lock&Lock as a brand, but I didn’t want to buy all the rectangle pieces individually and I was having a really hard time deciding which sizes I needed. It’s hard to tell from pictures online and I kept using a ruler to approximate how big or small things were. I wanted to make sure we would be investing in smart size since this would cost us way more than plastic containers.
At the same time, I was also lamenting the fact that QVC Germany offers some awesome lime or purple Lock&Lock sets that would totally go in our kitchen, but they only ship to Germany. Rats! Likewise, all those cheap US options don’t ship here.
Having gotten really fed up with searching, I finally made the decision to order the two Emsa sets above as well as two Silit sets for about 190CHF with shipping. That would give us 12 containers in addition to our glass Pyrex and the few bell jars that we have.
Did I save money? I think I still did. 190CHF works out to 15.8 a container, which is generally how much the small to midsize rectangle Lock&Lock cost from Globus. Also… bonus: with their black lids and red silicon, the Silit containers should be fairly stain-proof against tomato sauce and curry! I think that’s worth paying a little extra for…
Not only am I happy that we will be storing most if not all of our food in glass going forward, I am very happy that we are no longer strapped for containers! I had bought just the bare minimum to get by with plastic and we were always running out and sometimes had to stick whole pots of food or pans in the fridge. So happy I’m back to my usual storage container setup!
Also happy how many small containers I have! I figure if I still want some more, I should try the IKEA ones out since they are such a good price, but I’m looking forward to next summer when I can just heat these up and stick them in my bag to head to the lake.
I might have been able to find an Amazon business that ships to Switzerland, but I would have had to deal with exorbitant shipping fees and import taxes, so I’m happy to just have my containers sorted out locally.
Have you converted to glass storage containers yet?