Convenient & Affordable Vegetables from Kita.ph

Ever since the pandemic, we have not been going to the palengke anymore to buy vegetables.

We’ve been relying on buying vegetables at the supermarket (expensive), and also ordering from some online vegetable sellers.

Last March, a friend recommended I try Kita.ph, and we have been ordering our vegetables there ever since.

My friend claimed that the vegetables were much cheaper than other places.

At first, I was hesitant to try it because I’ve never heard of it before. The website looks, errr… basic.

So for the first order, I only did Cash on Delivery (COD). It was FREE DELIVERY (minimum P1,000 order). The only con is that they deliver 2 days later, they don’t do ASAP delivery, so plan your purchases accordingly.

True enough, the prices at Kita.ph were so much cheaper!!!

The prices fluctuate though. Like, last April 30, 1/4 kilo of French beans was only P47.50 while for my order today, it was P67.50. Overall, the vegetables are still cheaper than other places.

Link to Kita.ph:

https://kita.ph/?ref=KARENJOYCEYAM

Current prices (as of writing):

And then a funny thing happened. My neighbor messaged me that the delivery guy for our vegetable order went to them instead. It turns out that my neighbor is a friend of the owner of Kita.PH and has been ordering from them, so the rider assumed it was for my neighbor and went to his house. My neighbor cleared things up, and the delivery guy went to our house to deliver our vegetables.

After finding out that my neighbor knows the owner, I felt more confident ordering from Kita.ph the next time.

So How Are the Vegetables from Kita.PH?

It is difficult to buy things sight unseen, especially vegetables, so I had low expectations.

However, most of the vegetables we received are okay. Some are really good/fresh, especially leafy greens. Most vegetables are okay, maybe not as nice as those I would pick out myself from the palengke but still okay. But there are always 1-2 items with issues. The first time, some of our eggplants had worms. But this sometimes happens even if we buy from the supermarket (the eggplants are wrapped together in plastic so we can’t inspect them), so it’s not a deal breaker for me.

The potatoes we received on our most recent order are on the smaller side and are not the waxy kind I prefer, but still perfectly usable.

Our order arrived like this:

In general, about 80-90% of vegetables received are okay, so it’s still a good deal considering the low prices. Sulit pa rin.

This is 2 tali of kangkong (currently P15):

My current regular buy is their sayote – 1 kilo, about 3 pcs of sayote, is only P35! I love sautéed sayote with some small dried shrimp.

All this ampalaya for only P88!

Other vegetables:

I’m kind of sad about this mustasa they sent us though:

Aside from vegetables, they also have fruits. So it really saves a trip to the palengke – saves time, gas, parking, and having to take a shower as soon as getting home. The only things we miss are tofu, lumpia wrapper and fresh fish, but we can get these at the supermarket/ other sellers.

Kita.ph even has “rare” vegetables like sugar beets, French beans (P67.50 for 250g), cherry tomatoes, cilantro (wansoy), round eggplant, round red radish, Japanese cucumbers, zucchini, dayap, etc…

They don’t have malunggay, but we have our own malunggay trees so we don’t need to buy malunggay.

I usually order P1,000+ worth of vegetables and fruits that will be good for 2 weeks, but often we can go up to 3 weeks if we order food delivery sometimes or get sent food by friends & relatives, before needing to reorder. We cook the leafy greens first, and keep the hardier vegetables to use later.

This is so much cheaper, no doubt! P1,000+ worth of vegetables and fruits from Kita.ph is a lot! We also have a variety of vegetables to choose from when cooking. I usually buy the Flash Sale vegetables. I also get some corn, camote, radish, upo, ampalaya, mustasa, okra, etc… aside from the usual onions, garlic, ginger, carrots, potatoes and tomatoes, pechay or cabbage, calamansi, leeks.

The corn we sometimes use in soup (nilagang baka), sometimes we just boil and eat them as a snack. The camote can also be a snack (camote cue), or cooked into sautéed camote ala Korean samgyup banchan, some we boil and mash with some butter, or just plain boiled camote that we also mix with the cats’ food as advised by the vet. But our favorite thing to make with camote is fried camote balls with cheese filling – tedious to make though. We use this recipe but add a cube of cheese inside when shaping the balls 🙂

The leafy greens are usually sauteed Chinese-style with some soy sauce or oyster sauce, with some golden-fried garlic or fried shallots for garnish. Sometimes we make adobong okra, adobong kangkong, talbos ng camote, etc… takes minutes to cook. Or just plain steamed greens and bagoong dip. If I’m feeling fancy, we do a salted egg sauce on the kangkong or French beans 🙂 I’m thinking of making vingared spicy cabbage or pechay next, Szechuan style.

We try to eat some vegetables at every meal. Often it’s just sautéed vegetables, and cheap. One big tali of camote tops is P12.00 – P15.00. Sometimes we make a simple vegetable soup. I just want our family to have a variety of sources of nutrition and to eat more real food.

Radish is usually cooked with beef soup – you can do Korean style (soegogi muguk) or Hong Kong style beef with radish soup. Upo goes well with pork. Squash can be roasted, boiled with soup, made into squash bisque, or turned into pinakbet 🙂 We also like chicken tinola.

As for storage, some we keep wrapped in paper and in the vegetable drawer, some in covered plastic containers with drain rack, some in newspaper & plastic bag, for onions & garlic, we just store it in the onions & garlic tray in the kitchen – it really depends on the vegetable to be stored.

Ordering and Payment

Ordering is as easy as adding to cart!

The user interface isn’t as slick as Shopee or Lazada, but it works. Most vegetables are available in 1kg and 500g quantities, but some are also available in 250g, or 100g. You just have to make sure you choose the quantity you want or it defaults to 1 kilo.

You can also make edits in the Cart, but you have to go the Cart itself to do that, and not the popup cart that shows up.

The interface needs improvement, but it works.

You can access it on the the computer or on mobile.

When you’re done adding to cart, do checkout. I really recommend creating an account with Kita.ph so you have a record of your orders.

Please use my referral link:

https://members.kita.ph/create-account?ref=KARENJOYCEYAM

When you sign up as a member, you can also earn commissions from your own purchases! Just make sure to click on your own store link before checking out.

When I log in, I see that I’ve earned a small commission but I still don’t know how to use or claim them, haha. Hopefully they can be used as a discount for next purchases.

As for payment, they accept COD. For online payment, right now, they only accept Paymaya / Maya.

I did not download the Kita.ph android app because I just didn’t want to add another app on my phone when I didn’t really need to.

We’ve already ordered 4 times. The second order was the one I took photos of.

P.S. I am not connected to Kita.PH. I just signed up as a member, membership is free.

Summary

From what I gather, Kita.ph is working directly with farmers so I’m just considering it as a kind of rescue buy where it’s a win-win for everybody. The farmers are able to sell their produce, and I can get vegetables at a lower price, at reasonable quantities, no need to buy in bulk unlike if we buy from Rural Rising.

Overall, considering the low price, convenience and free delivery, my vegetable orders are still worth the money and I still find it very sulit and convenient to order from Kita.ph.

They don’t charge any Shopper fee. You pay for your total vegetable order and that’s it (free delivery if you reach P1,000).

I also appreciate the website where I can just click things to Add to Cart, checkout and be done. With our previous vegetable seller, we had to manually type in our order on FB messenger, LOL. Imagine having to type a long list of vegetables plus how many kilos each every time we need to order vegetables 😀

Now, after ordering from Kita.ph, I just wait for my order to arrive (about 2 days later). No need to go out of the house, no need to coordinate a Grab Express pickup. There just needs to be someone at home to receive the order because you don’t know what time it will arrive.