Hello Fresh: The beginning, middle and THE END (total= 4 months)

I thought I’d share with you my experiences with Hello Fresh, a popular service that delivers everything you need to make a wide variety of home-cooked meals each week. I’d first heard of HelloFresh from a flyer at a running event I was doing earlier this year. This type of service is great for people that are learning to cook or busy professionals that want to cook something quick, simple and tasty without worrying about buying a bunch of different kinds of food and finding recipes. I fall in both those categories.

THE BEGINNING.

My first delivery was in July 2015. I had signed up for the 3 meal a week plan. I have to admit that it was very exciting to start this service. I had not heard of this type of service and it seemed perfect for my lifestyle. The process is pretty simple: 1) Sign up, 2) Select your recipes, 3) Set your weekly delivery date. Then each week, you log in and decide which recipes you want for the following few weeks. There are 5 choices and you can select any 3. Then sit back and wait for your delivery.

The first delivery came and I was impressed. Within a very large box, each meal came nicely packaged in a shoebox-shaped box. Three boxes were laid out on the top, then a cardboard divider, then the meat on the bottom. The meat on the bottom had several large ice packs covering them. Then the whole thing is wrapped in a padded kraft paper wrapping to help with insulating the whole package.

I remember thinking the food wasn’t bad and I was super impressed that I actually made something I’d never, ever considered making (shrimp paella). As someone who loves to eat but hates to cook, this was a new and different experience for me and it was exciting. I thought it fit with my lifestyle pretty good and I decided to continue with the service.

THE MIDDLE.

The boxes I received in the subsequent weeks were a consistent hit or miss, with some issue and different problem occurring each subsequent week.

All of the issues that I describe below are not in chronological order. I thought it would be an easier list to summarize and read if it was listed by issue. These issues occurred in about 10-12 deliveries over the 4 months I was an active subscriber.

Packaging

1. Completely and totally excessive. Box was at least twice as large as any competitor (Blue Apron, Madison & Rayne, etc)
2. Huge amount to recycle each week. The company had no provisions to pick up boxes to reuse nor reuse ice packs.
3. Because of the huge box, sometimes the ice packs moved off of the meat during transport and meat would arrive “kinda cold but not really.” The first week, I had shrimp arrive at room temperature due to the ice packs being on once side of the box and the meat being on the other side of the box.

Delivery

1. Delivery was unreliable at best. I had several deliveries arrive a day late.
2. Redelivery options are not viable. If you need to skip a week but forget to pause delivery (like I did one week) Hello Fresh told me they would happily reroute the box to a friend. I thought that was great….until I found out that the box took another 4 full days to get to my friend (who lives about 2-3 miles away from me). 8-9 days in transit. My friend opened the box and was greeted with a huge wave of rotting meat smell. She ended up tossing out everything, (including some veggies that were likely fine) because she was so disgusted. She said she would never order from Hello Fresh ever as she now associates it with the rotting box she received. Hello Fresh should have clearly stated they recommend rerouting to a neighbor or anyone VERY VERY close by as to not interrupt the delivery schedule.

Produce quality

1. Two of the roughly 10 deliveries I had were missing ingredients. So 20% of the time, you’ll have to figure out if you can make due with whatever was not in the box.
2. At least one or two of the boxes each week will have wilted or rotted vegetables. One day it was the tarragon, another day it was the arrugula and yet another day it was a tomato and brussel sprouts. Minor wilting is not a big deal. All of the ones I just mentioned were from different meals and all had to be thrown out. The brussel sprouts I got was rampant with those worms that invade brussel sprouts (I’m sure you know what I’m talking about….these litle bugs eat themselves into the center, one leaf at a time).
3. As mentioned in the delivery section, if you are unlucky with the way the box moves during transport, you can end up with room temperature meat. I had this on about 4 occasions. I asked for credit back on 1, threw away 2 and ate the other. Worth noting that I did NOT get sick on the room temperature meat I ate but was stressed out the whole evening because I thought I would get ill. Last time I put myself through that.
4. Expired meat – yes, this happened to me and more than once. Always check the expiration and ‘best by’ dates and never eat expired meat. Why chance that, especially since transit takes days and the temperature of the meat fluctuates due to the moving ice pack and outside temperature.
5. Exploding meat package – Yep, this happened to me too on a package of flank steak. Blood everywhere…on all the food boxes and veggies. YUCK what a mess. So much blood that it bled through the padded packaging, and also through the outer box.

Customer Service
1. Account randomly canceled while I was out of the country.

• Hello Fresh sent an email indicating they had canceled my account
• I told them I did not cancel and was expecting a delivery the following week
• They reinstated my account and issued a credit

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2. Customer service could not explain why my account was canceled

• I asked what happened and that I was relying on that delivery due to being out of the country and having a  box when I came home would be perfect
• They repeated the fact that they gave me a credit.

3. Customer Service answers a different question other than the one you asked.

• I emailed them again asking why they did not honor my delivery and what happened with my account.
• I got a response back saying they have”reviewed my account” and the reason why I did not get the delivery is because the delivery was paused by me.
• I explained to them had they really reviewed my account or even read the last correspondence that they  would not have responded that way. In fact, that date was not paused at all. And I had asked why my account was canceled.
• I get a call from Hello Fresh asking me to call them.
• I decide it was not worth my time

Why didn’t they just respond in a simple manner is beyond me.   All I wanted was something like this: We apologize. Your account was inactivated due to an technical issue on our side. Due to this unexpected issue, your scheduled delivery for Thurs could not be fulfilled. This was our error and we have issued you a full credit of $xx for that box you should have received. Additionally, we will give you a partial credit of $xx on your next order just for your trouble. We thank you for doing business with us. Again, please accept our apologies for any inconvenience this might have caused. Please let us know if we can be of further assistance.

That’s all I wanted. Simple, basic, clear, timely customer service. HelloFresh has awful customer service.

Marketing
Incessant emails from hello fresh: their newsletter, recipe rating, promos, surveys, referrals, free boxes, etc. You name it, you get from them. An INSANE amount of unfocused marketing. (I am a marketer). Amazingly enough, there is no “reminder email” to ensure you select your meals by the deadline for the following week. The one thing that would be helpful is the only one they don’t send.

Referral program
Confusing free box promos vs referral promos. If you introduce a friend to Hello Fresh, you may or may not get referral credit through their program. If you give them a free box, you don’t get credit if they sign up. If you “refer” them, then you do get credit. Yea, pretty awful. I had to email them and really press the subject to get them to give me referral credit for the 2 friends I got to subscribe (BOTH friends have since canceled their Hello Fresh subscription due to similar issues I mentioned above.

Recipes
Ok, I’m not expecting every single recipe to blow my mind. It’s simple food and that’s what I signed up for. That said, there are some AWFUL recipes. One that comes to mind is Chinese Black Bean Chicken. I honestly could not stop laughing while I was making this meal. Does the chef realize that Chinese black bean is not actually made with the black beans that you put in a burrito? Chinese black bean is FERMENTED SOYBEAN! This dish was so wrong, it makes the top 10 stupidest things I’ve ever eaten (Chinese black bean https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douchi)

Mind you, some recipes are really good – one that comes to mind is the Chicken Sausage with Tangy Cabbage and Butternut Squash-Apple Puree. Every morsel of that dish was awesome.

Timing
Hello fresh claims that all meals can be made under an hour. Most recipes are listed at 30-45 mins from start to table.

I dare anyone to make, from scratch, 20 pieces of Chinese wontons in 45 minutes. This took me about 2 hours. I would say all other recipes are about a solid hour. Nothing has taken less than 45 mins.

The END.
The end occured on Nov 11, 2015. I received the box and when I opened it, the entire inside was covered with blood. One of the steak packages exploded. The blood soaked through the padded insulation and through the outer box. Below are some pictures of the stain. But the clincher was when I pulled the package of shrimp out of the box. The shrimp looked kinda funky so I flipped it over to check the expiration date. July 17, 2015. Hello Fresh sent me shrimp nearly 4 months past the expiration date.

All this is way too frustrating and I’m too young to die. I canceled my subscription permanently that very evening. And you know what — I explained the whole situation with the shrimp 4 months past expiration and I didn’t get a single apology from them. All in all, with the 10-12 deliveries, I had to ask for credit on nearly 30% of them. (Sidenote:  The customer service reps are REALLY good at issuing credit.  They don’t need to understand what’s going on or find the causes of the problems you have.  They quickly issue the credit and move on.  That’s what customer service means to them.)

In conclusion, I am thankful for this experience. I have discovered the joys of a home cooked meal subscription service. As I mentioned, it serves my lifestyle very well. I’ve also learned that sometimes I enjoy cooking….at the very least I enjoy surprising myself when I’ve made something I never thought I’d ever be able to make (Shrimp Paella). I have explored other companies and can say that nearly from every aspect, other companies are better than Hello Fresh. Outside of the complete and total miss in some recipes, I actually enjoyed the food. But they make it hard at every turn to do business with them. They slowly and steadily lost my business permanently. It’s not worth the trouble and I would never recommend this company to anyone ever again.

I have moved on to a company called Blue Apron (http://www.blueapron.com) and will post my experiences after a few more months.

Hello Fresh – http://www.hellofresh.com