14 best personalised food and drink gifts
What do you get for the food lover who has everything? Well, you get their favourite foodstuff – personalised of course.
This year brands have gone all out with customisable gifts, offering everything from chocolate to premium booze, all available to put your own stamp on, whether that’s with initials, messages or even photographs.
Now is the time get creative, but do take your time when deciding what to say – once you’ve ordered it, any spelling mistakes will be yours and yours alone.
The team at food and drink website Crummbs round up their favourites for the festive season.
Veuve Clicquot Brut Personalisation Tin 750ml: £54.99, Selfridges
Those that like the finer things in life will adore this personalised champagne tin. You can use a maximum of 14 characters and underneath the personalisation it will tell you how many kilometres your chosen location is from Reims (where Veuve Cliquot produces its champagne). Each tin contains a bottle of the good stuff but, even long after the bubbles have been drunk, the tin will surely take pride of place on their drinks trolley.
Biscuiteers Iced Christmas Biscuit Tin: £39.50 (+£5 for personalisation), Biscuiteers
This family-sized tin of 16 biscuits is sure to put a smile on their face. Choose from festive all-spice, crowd-pleasing chocolate or gluten-free vanilla. You’ll receive snowflakes, snowmen, presents and puddings, all iced to perfection in true Biscuiteers style. To make it that little bit more distinctive, each box contains one present-shaped biscuit which can be iced with up to 26 characters. And even after you’ve finished every last crumb, you’ll have a pretty nifty illustrated tin to re-use.
Marmite Yeast Extract 250g: £4.99 (+£2.99 delivery), Marmite
Love it or hate it, the personalised Marmite jars are back. It couldn’t be simpler to customise – just type the name of the recipient (up to 10 characters) and it will arrive in the post. You also have the option of adding a gift box. We love the slightly retro-looking Classic design, but new for this year is the “Gene Jar”. If you’re just not sure if you were born a lover or a hater, Marmite has developed a gene test kit (all it needs is a mouth swab) to find out once and for all. If that all sounds like a step too far, you can still take part in the Taste Face Test. Using facial analysis, the test will determine your true feelings. It’s well worth a look if you fancy a laugh.
Cadbury’s Gifts: from £2.69 for 45g bar, Cadbury’s
At Cadbury’s you can personalise everything from an individual 45g bar of Dairy Milk, more substantial boxes of Milk Tray, or a whopping 850g bar (if they’ve really been good). You’ve got up to 30 characters to play with on the larger boxes, so why not play around with special dates or messages? You can even add photos (we’ll turn a blind eye to soppy pet names this once). Surely this will keep greedy paws off of our secret stash?
Master of Malt Personalised Whisky or Whiskey: from £59.50 for 70cl, Master of Malt
Not just for Christmas, a bottle of fine whisky or whiskey (if you’re buying an Irish or American bottle) is a great gift all year round. With these ones from Master of Malt, you can add a message of your choice across four lines, and the clever visualisation tool will show you how the finished product will look. There’s a full flavour spectrum of whiskies available, from sweeter whisky liqueurs through to peaty, smoky single malts and even a 50-year-old blend. Not sure what they’ll like? The 10 Year Old Liqueur is the most popular bottling, accounting for around 20 per cent of personalised whisky sales, closely followed by Glenallachie 6 Year Old, which makes up around 15 per cent. For those who are more adventurous – or looking for a gift for someone who really does have everything – there’s the Blend Your Own Whisky option. Customers can perfect the recipe online and then give the resulting masterpiece its own name. Complete the gift with a tasting glass for extra brownie points.
The Johnnie Walker Personalised Label: from £32.95, The Whisky Exchange
Not great with words? Say it with a photo instead. Choose your Johnnie Walker of choice – Double Black, Green Label or the most premium, Gold Label – and simply upload a photo (you can also add stickers and text). It’s a complete doddle to use but there’s also a handy video to help you out too. The Whisky Exchange is the first in the world to use this label studio so you really will be gifting something your recipient has never seen before.
Green & Black’s Personalised Chocolate: from £2.50, Green & Black’s
All eight flavours in the Green & Black’s organic range are available to be personalised. Choose from Almond, 70% Dark, Milk, White, Butterscotch, Burnt Toffee, Ginger and Sea Salt – all of which are delicious – or mix and match. You’ll have up to 40 characters to utilise and the back can also be put to good use with longer messages.
G’Vine Dot Box Limited Edition 700ml: £58, Harvey Nichols
While most gins are made with grain, G’Vine Gin is a luxury spirit made with a blend of botanicals, including juniper berries, green cardamom, ginger roots and the precious vine flower, which blossoms just once a year in mid-June, and exists for just a few days before maturing into a grape berry. For this reason we’d recommend drinking it with frozen berries and a sprig of basil, rather than your regular citrus slice. Whichever way you drink it, we think you’ll agree it’s delicious and deserves the very best tonic. For Christmas, G’Vine has introduced personalised gift boxes, made up of removable dots which can be pushed out to create patterns, shapes, and initials.
Candy Mechanics Lolpop: £20 for 3, Candy Mechanics
We’ve found a great gift for selfie lovers – a 3D image of your own face, on a stick! All you need to do is upload a 30 second video from your mobile phone (you’ll need a friend to help you out). Start by removing any sunglasses or hats, and get your helper to move the camera around your head so it takes in your every angle (yep, even your bad side) but don’t move your head – just the camera. Candy Mechanics will then magically create your 3D head out of delicious Belgian chocolate, finishing it with an edible gold spray paint for the final flourish. We were blown away by just how lifelike they turned out. It works particularly well if you have very distinctive features, like big, curly hair. We’ll be sticking these in everyone’s stockings this year.
Grey Goose Vodka Engraving, 40%: £51.95 for 70cl, Prestige Drinks
We’re not sure we’d ever want this bottle to end if it had been personalised for us. Having said that, we’re not sure we could resist the award-winning smooth-as-silk spirit either. From Cognac in France, this breakthrough wheat-based small-batch premium vodka was awarded a Platinum medal at the World Spirits Championship. Expect a clean, fresh taste with a creamy finish. After all, no drinks cabinet is complete without this universally popular cocktail base.
Personalised Quality Street Tins: £7.50, Sainsbury’s
Looking for something, ahem, quality to gift this season? Nestlé’s Quality Street has teamed up with selected Sainsbury’s stores across the country (Oldbury, Cheadle, Sydenham, Epsom and Harrogate) to give you the opportunity to customise your tin for free. You’ll have up to nine characters to replace the word “Quality” with a name or street of your choice. We can’t promise it will stop granny pinching all the purple ones, but we think it’s a real collectable that they’ll keep forever.
Sainsbury’s Taste the Difference Record a Message Tin: £10, Sainsbury’s
If you don’t manage to get your hands on a tin of Quality Street, Sainsbury’s has this rather nifty biscuit tin which allows you to record your own voice message for the lucky recipient. Stuffed to the brim with Taste the Difference Triple Chocolate Chunk, Stem Ginger and Sultana All Butter Cookies, it’s a great way to share a festive message with family and friends who you can’t see over the Christmas period. Each time the tin is opened, the message will play – we’re thinking “Put the biscuits down” might not be in the Christmas spirit.
Harrods White Sourdough: from £3, Harrods
Maybe not quite gift material (although a good loaf with lashings of salted butter is always very welcome in our house), Harrods is now offering a freshly baked loaf of sourdough with your choice of up to three initials which will be available in two sizes. It’s part of the department store’s newly renovated Roastery and Bake Hall and is created by its master baker, Lance Gardner. He’s spent months perfecting it, and it really needs to be smelt to be believed. Delicious. We’ll be purchasing one for Christmas Day breakfast and taking plenty of snaps for Instagram before cutting into it.
Fortnum & Mason Personalised Celebration Gift Box: £100, Fortnum & Mason
Presented in Fortnum & Mason’s famous turquoise green gift box, the first thing the eye is drawn to when you open it up is the Blanc de Blancs Champagne, which can be personalised with your own special message. Drink it alone or make use of the little bottle of Cassis to make a round of Kir Royal cocktails on Christmas Day. Aside from that, each box contains an elegant long tin (adorned with a gold monkey, no less) of Fortnum's Pistachio and Clotted Cream Biscuits and decadently rich chocolate truffles, ideal to enjoy with the loose leaf Darjeeling tea. In short, it’s a luxurious box, filled with delicious and useful bits that you’ll actually want to eat and drink – nothing will get relegated to the back of the cupboard here.
The Verdict: Personalised food and drink gifts
If we could choose anything for under our tree this Christmas, it would have to be a personalised bottle of Veuve Clicquot from Selfridges – maybe we’d even share it with the kind gift-giver. However, if you’re looking to please the whole family, Biscuiteers’ box of festive goodies will surely put a smile on their face and is a treat they wouldn’t buy themselves. They arrived in absolutely pristine condition and tasted just like Christmas. We’ll be keeping the tin to put our Christmas decorations away in once the biscuits have all been eaten.
