Foodie Christmas Gift Ideas: Seven Gifts Worth Considering This Festive Season

Introduction

Foodie gifts are a reliable route through the festive season: they feel personal, they get used, and they scale from stocking fillers to proper centrepiece presents. We put seven very different options through their paces, from a five-pound jar of chilli jam to a tabletop smoker, so you can match a gift to your budget and the person you are buying for. Here is how each one fared.

1251 Scotch Bonnet Chilli Jam

This is chef James Cochran’s Scotch Bonnet Chilli Jam from his restaurant 1251, and it earns its place as a near-perfect stocking filler. It is suitable for vegans, gluten-free, contains nothing artificial, and is made in small batches by hand. At £5, it sits firmly in the premium-jam price bracket, but the quality backs it up.

The heat is the clever part: it grows steadily but never reaches the point of being uncomfortable, and it never masks the flavour of whatever you are eating. It simply adds warmth. It is genuinely versatile too, stirred through mayo, folded into mac and cheese, or paired with a festive breakfast.

If you want to stretch the idea further, a few jars like this, combined with marmalades, chutneys and relishes in a small hamper box with some straw, turns a modest budget into an impressively large gift.

Tooletries Shower Drink Holder

The Tooletries Shower Drink Holder is exactly what it sounds like: a silicone holder that secures your beverage to the wall of your shower, made from 100% antibacterial silicone and designed to attach to smooth, clean surfaces including glass and tiles. At £12, it is firmly in novelty secret Santa territory, and it will get a laugh when it is unwrapped.

The honest caveat is adhesion. On the right surfaces it holds well, but in testing it slid off plasticky shower glass and a steamy mirror, so it is very dependent on your bathroom. Full transparency matters here: if your surfaces are not smooth and clean, the fun may be short-lived.

If you know someone who genuinely enjoys a cold drink in a hot shower or bath, it is a cool little gift. Otherwise, it is a guaranteed laugh with a mixed practical record.

Zara Home Recipe Book

The Zara Home recipe book is an unusual one: a beautifully made book of mostly blank pages, structured so you can build your own collection of favourite recipes. You can clip recipes from cookbooks, magazines and newspapers and tuck them in, or write your own. It feels good quality, and it is the kind of object you would be happy to give someone.

There is something quietly sentimental about it. Recipes have been handed down this way for centuries, scribbled from radio shows onto scraps of paper and kept for decades. This is that tradition, given a smart modern home. At £17.99 it is more of a considered, lifelong gift than an impulse buy, and it suits someone who cooks, collects, or simply loves the ritual of food.

Burrows and Hare Thermal Lunch Bag

Packed-lunch options used to be a carrier bag or a kids’ lunchbox, but the market has moved on, and the Burrows and Hare Thermal Lunch Bag is part of a new wave of more considered, artisan options. This one is handmade in Oxford from durable waxed cotton canvas with a foil thermal lining, and it tested well: ice cubes stayed cold inside it.

The thermal lining is the practical payoff. If you have made something yourself, or you are taking leftovers from the night before, keeping it cold means no fighting for office fridge space. The brand positions it as versatile, doubling as a wash bag or anything in between, though it is arguably a little big as a wash bag and just right as a lunch bag.

At £24.99 it is reasonably priced for something handmade, though note there is no handle on this version; the brand sells a more strappy design at a higher price.

Slush Puppie Machine

The Slush Puppie Machine leans fully into nostalgia, decked out in the original branding, and it works for everything from classic fruit slush to frozen cocktails. You make the slush with the salt-and-ice method: salt lowers the temperature of the icy core so the mixture slowly freezes into that familiar slushy texture, then you dispense and, optionally, add alcohol.

The result delivers on the memory. It is cold, slushy and nostalgic, and the flavour takes you straight back to childhood, though the texture is slightly different from how you remember it. One practical note: many competing units have a built-in refrigeration element, and the salt-and-ice approach here has limits, so starting with everything ice cold helps.

At £45 for the machine plus £7 per syrup, it is not cheap, and it feels steep until you remember it is a party centrepiece. For the right person, that price is justifiable.

Tabletop Barbecue Smoker

This tabletop barbecue smoker is aimed squarely at people who love outdoor cooking but lack the space for a full-sized barbecue: flat dwellers with a balcony, or allotment types who want something small enough to fit in the boot of a car. It is a mini version of the classic oil-drum shape, with a carry handle and a latch.

It works two ways. Fill the bottom with charcoal and it functions as a conventional barbecue, or use the built-in divider to run it as an offset smoker, with the fire on one side heating the food indirectly and vents to control temperature. That vent and temperature control is what separates it from improvised smoking setups in a wok or a foil-covered tray.

In practice, it delivered: pomegranate-glazed chicken thighs smoked with whiskey chips at around 150 degrees Celsius for an hour and a half came out delicious. At £79 it is not trivial money for “a bit of metal”, but it opens up real smoking opportunities without needing a garden or a big investment.

Sorted Christmas Gift Bundle

The final option is a bundle rather than a single product: an apron, a remastered cookbook, and a full year’s membership to the meal packs app, which includes digital cookbooks and hundreds of podcast episodes. The cookbooks include previously sold-out titles in a limited run, alongside the wider back catalogue.

At £65 for all three, it works out considerably cheaper than buying everything separately, which makes it one of the most complete foodie gifts on this list for anyone already into cooking. If you are buying for a genuine foodie, or treating yourself, the breadth of the bundle is the point.

Overall Buying Advice

Match the gift to the person, not the price tag. For small budgets or office swaps, the chilli jam at £5 is a genuinely useful gift that will get used regularly, and building a small hamper of jars amplifies it. The shower drink holder is a laugh-first novelty that depends entirely on the recipient’s bathroom surfaces. The Zara Home recipe book suits sentimental, craft-minded recipients, while the Burrows and Hare lunch bag is a practical everyday upgrade at a fair handmade price.

For bigger budgets, the Slush Puppie Machine and the tabletop smoker both reward a specific kind of recipient: a nostalgia-lover who entertains, or an outdoor cook without garden space. And for the fully committed foodie, the bundle packs the most value into a single purchase.

Conclusion

Seven gifts, seven different recipients. A well-chosen foodie gift tends to get used long after the festive season ends, whether that is a jar emptied into weekly mayo, a lunch bag filled every morning, or a smoker wheeled out to the allotment. Pick the one that matches who you are buying for, and you are on solid ground.