Vegan Snack Bento Box Recipes + FREE GIFT OFFER! Healthy Snacks on a Budget - Mind Over Munch

Hey Munchies! Today I am sharing some vegan snack boxes to inspire you for the New Year. I am really excited because I've teamed up with Thrive Market for this video. Thrive Market is an awesome online store that sells premium organic and healthy products at 25-50% off shipped right to your door. I am a busy gal, so not having to make the trip to the store is definitely a plus. And to be honest, they have pretty much every healthy food I've ever heard of. But it is pretty nuts. To make today especially great, I asked Thrive Market to give you something special today. So if you use the link in the description to sign up, you're going to get $60 of free organic groceries and free shipping. I'll share more details about that at the end of the video. Let's get to the first box! I'm starting with some cucumber and adding a layer of hummus along with another cucumber slice to make these little cucumber sammies adorable and delicious. In the next compartment, I'm adding some of the dates I got from Thrive Market. These are certified organic Bejeweled dates and are super soft, sweet, and nutrient-rich. Thrive Market products don't contain artificial additives or preservatives, which I love. I like to pick these for easier eating and it's so simple. I just slice down the outside of the date and pop out that bit. Into the box they go! I also got these awesome coconut butter squeeze packets from Thrive Market, which are great for on-the-go. I love coconut butter! It's healthy, naturally sweet, and totally delicious, being pureed from the flesh of the coconut fruit. It's great on its own, but one of my favorite ways to eat it is with those dates that I put in the box earlier. Drizzle that goodness right into the pitted date and pop it! The last component of the first box are skewered berries. Food on toothpicks or skewers are just so much more fun to eat, plus they give this box a nice pop of color. Box one is complete with sweet and savory options, including vegetables, fruit, and all macronutrients. On to the next box! For this one, I start with a kiwi. Check out this cool hack! Cut it in half and close it back up with a rubber band for easy access when you're ready to snack. Pack it with a cute wooden spoon, and you've got a nifty and fun way to enjoy your kiwi! In the next compartment, I add in delicious buffalo coconut wrap pinwheels. I use these coconut wraps which I got from Thrive Market. They're gluten-free, raw, vegan, and paleo-friendly, and great for savory or sweet recipes. And I must say, they pair super well with this buffalo mixture! Stay tuned to the end of the bento box presentation to see me make these buffalo pinwheels with the founder of Thrive Market himself! For a sweeter component, I've got sesame caramel energy balls. These use the dates I showed earlier, as well as this tahini from Thrive Market. Tahini is a sesame seed butter or paste, and a lot of people are familiar with it from Middle Eastern cuisine, but many don't realize it's great in desserts too! Tahini provides B vitamins, vitamin E, zinc, and protein. It can also be one of the pricier healthy foods, but Thrive Market keeps this premium item much more affordable. I add pitted dates, rolled oats, sunflower seeds, tahini, vanilla paste—you could use extract if preferred—and a pinch of salt to the food processor, and blend until I get a sticky dough. Then I use a small cookie scoop and roll the mixture into little energy balls and coat them with sesame seeds. Store in the fridge. Dates and tahini seem like a weird combination, but they oddly resemble a caramel flavor, which pairs really nicely with the sesame seeds, and makes clean treats so much easier, more fun, and of course, nutritious. A super satisfying sweet snack! I finish off this box with some carrot chips for extra veggies and color. I bought them at the grocery store already cut like that, and for some reason, they are just way more fun to eat! Somethin' about chips! This box also has a great mix of nutritious foods, colors, flavors, and textures. The last box I'm sharing is actually a low-carb and vegan bento snack box. I get a lot of people asking if low-carb and vegan can exist together, and the answer is sure! It can be done! I'm starting with some baked broccoli fritters. I combine water and ground flax to make flax egg. This is how we're keeping these babies vegan. Feel free to use real eggs if you don't need these to be vegan, and they'll still be low-carb with an extra boost of protein. Let that sit for a few minutes to thicken. In the food processor, add broccoli florets, chopped onion, parsley, and garlic. Pulse a few times until the mixture is crumbly like rice. Add that to a bowl and mix in your flax egg, coconut flour, cumin, onion powder, salt, and coconut oil. Stir to combine and mix into a dough. It will be crumbly, but should still hold together when compacted. I used a cookie scoop and made sure it was pressed in well before forming it into a patty shape in my hands, and then transferred to a foil pan. Bake in the oven until crispy and cooked through. These are great hot or cold, and I love that I'm getting my veggies in! For fruits, I add blackberries and raspberries, which are great lower-carb options since they're naturally lower in sugar. For protein, I'm making some tofu sesame cubes. Tofu is a great plant-based protein source that's also low in carbs. I used sprouted tofu, which is also slightly lower in carbs than traditional. I press my tofu and then cut it into cubes. For the marinade, I'm using Bragg's Liquid Aminos, which I got from Thrive Market. It's a natural soy sauce alternative that's rich in amino acids. Feel free to use soy sauce, coconut aminos, or any other substitute that you prefer for this recipe too. Also, it's cool to know that Thrive Market has all of those options, and probably pretty much every single ingredient we use today. It's worth the peruse! I combine my liquid aminos, sesame oil, sesame seeds, cumin, and garlic powder to make the marinade. Toss the tofu cubes and let it sit for 30 minutes to overnight so it can soak up that flavor. Add to a baking sheet and bake in the oven until golden brown. These are also delicious hot or cold, so they're great for on-the-go. And perfect for simple snacking that provides protein, dietary fat, and is still low in carbohydrates. The last component of the low-carb box is this 100% cacao dark chocolate from Thrive Market. Chocolate generally has some milk in it, but if it's 100% dark, it doesn't. It's high in fat and fiber, keeping it low in carbohydrates, and without the milk, it's vegan. I am generally NOT a dark chocolate fan, but I was surprised that this brand actually tasted very high quality and wasn't that bitter considering it's so dark. Pretty cool! Also, I had to take a second to appreciate the cute packaging. This box might be my favorite. Which is yours? Now, let's check out Thrive Market Headquarters. Hey guys, we are at Thrive Market Headquarters with the founder, Gunnar. Hey, what's going on? Thank you so much for having us. I am here today to make a buffalo chickpea pinwheel with you. It's going to go in one of our vegan snack boxes because we are big into bentos on our channel. The first thing I'm going to have you do is start mashing up some chickpeas. I love chickpeas. Do you? Yeah. Why don't you tell us how Thrive Market got started and why? Yeah, so, you know, it comes from a really personal place. I grew up really poor with a single mom and saw how hard she worked to make healthy choices. It always seemed crazy to me that food with lots of chemicals and processing costs less than food with no chemicals and processing. And when my mother remarried, my stepfather was running a food co-op out of a little hippie commune and I got to see firsthand the power of group buying as a way to make food more affordable and build community. And so that's really the genesis of the business. So we're going to mix in some buffalo sauce, some DIY ranch seasoning. So we're just going to mix that in and you can toss in that buffalo sauce. So that's some green onion and we can just kind of mix that together. Do you want to put any olive oil? Do you want to add some olive oil? I mean, that's my favorite Thrive product. Is that your favorite Thrive product? Yeah. I was actually admiring the packaging. This is like super premium, virgin, cold-pressed, organic olive oil, which the price is incredible and it'd be like three or four times as much at a grocery store. That's amazing. We've got our buffalo mixture. I'm going to use these Thrive Market coconut wraps, which are pretty cool. These are also amazing. Yeah, I know. It's pretty cool. They're great with savory and sweet stuff. These are really sturdy, which is really cool. So we're just going to kind of spread this out. Okay, so Gennar, can you talk to me about something that you struggle with when it comes to a healthy lifestyle? It could be food-related, fitness-related. One of the things that we kind of connect on in this community is just acknowledging that being healthy is hard. It's not as easy as a lot of people want to make it out to be. I mean, just being a human being is kind of hard. It is. Something that's really personal is I used to be overweight when I was a teenager. I think it came from being pretty depressed. I think there's a lot of reasons why people have body weight issues, emotional eating. That's an area where I notice still today, if I'm stressed out, I'm instantly trying to put something in my mouth. Yeah, the guilt. And then you beat yourself up because you know you shouldn't do it, but you're still doing it. Or you eat something bad, and then you're like, well, the day is done. I might as well continue to eat terribly. That's my biggest problem. Then you pull out two cartons of ice cream, and it just goes downhill from there. Okay, so we're just going to take this and roll it really, really tight. So kind of fold over in the middle, and then try to keep it as tight as possible. At the end, if you fear it won't stick, I've got a little bit of hummus here, and we can just kind of glue it up. So we've got our little rolls, and now we can cut them into pinwheels. And then we've got our little pinwheels. It's like a chickpea sushi roll. It is. That's exactly what it's like. So time to taste test? Yeah. Let's do it. I really like that. That's really good. So Gunnar has kindly offered you all $60 of free groceries. Your first three orders, you will get $20 off on each order. The information on how to access that is in the description box below. Make sure you use the link that is in the description to get that deal. And also, one more thing I want to point out, in case you thought Thrive Market couldn't get any better, is that you guys actually give back. Because with every person who signs up, you donate a membership to a low-income family, veteran, or teacher. Yeah, we thought that was important. I grew up with a single mom. We wanted to make sure if you couldn't afford the membership, that we could get one to you anyway. And then we use eco-friendly packaging on everything. So 100% post-consumer recycled packaging. We're excited to be here. That is awesome. Well, I feel really lucky to be able to support this community. So thank you for having me here today, and hopefully we'll see you again. Bam! I hope you guys enjoyed these snack boxes and my trip to Thrive Market headquarters. Keep in mind that these aren't necessarily intended to be a snack eaten all at once. It depends on you. It could be for use throughout the day, maybe you want to package them differently, whatever, I am just sharing them in the bento box format like this for fun presentation. Thrive Market's platform is sortable by over 90 categories and depending on dietary needs. So if you're looking for only plant-based or gluten-free recipes, or only a type of food, it's super easy and fun to peruse. I will see you on Thursday for a brand new episode, and remember, it's all a matter of Mind Over Munch.