My Experience with Hello Fresh

A few months ago I complained to my daughter that sometimes Greg and I get so tired and bored with cooking dinner that we get take out. Katie told me that she sometimes gets meals through Hello Fresh — actually, she gets the ingredients and then cooks it up herself.

Wait, isn’t that almost the same as buying the ingredients at the grocery store and cooking your own meal? Sort of, but the entrée and side dishes are planned out for you, and they provide just the needed amounts of the ingredients in order to make the meal. Usually no measuring. No buying a whole jar of a spice that you need a half-teaspoon of, and then the jar sits in your pantry for 12 years. (They don’t include ingredients that most people already keep on hand, like salt and pepper, butter and cooking oil. And sometimes the herbs are fresh, not dried!) The directions for the meal are printed on a large card with photographs of the steps, suitable for keeping if you want to make it again from scratch.

Katie gave me a card with a special deal on it — the first box of meals free (just pay $4.99 for shipping); the next two boxes at 15% off. My plan also came with “free dessert for life”-providing you only eat dessert only once a week. (If you know anyone who uses Hello Fresh, they can hook you up with an introductory offer like the one I described.) You can terminate your membership at any time.

Katie usually orders 3 meals at a time. I think that’s the minimum order. You can order two-serving or four-serving meals, and I suppose you could order additional units if your family is larger. You need to use them within a week, because many ingredients are fresh produce. You don’t have to order every week, but if you skip a week, you have to notify them by the Sunday before the Friday delivery date, or they will send you three meals they’ve chosen for you.

I’ll start by listing the good points about Hello Fresh:

• The introductory offer. You can try it out for not much money.
• The quality of the food and recipes. They taste good and fresh, like home cooking. You might learn some techniques you’ll want to adopt in your own recipes. (Like roasting Brussels sprouts! I never tried them that way — they’re great!)
• They take away some of the burden of meal planning and shopping.
• It’s not cheap, but it is a good value. At 15% off, it’s about the price of fast food meals, but without that greasy, mass-produced flavor.

I looked through their menu online (it varies from week to week) and chose three meals that I thought both Greg and I would enjoy for our free initial order. That’s a challenge, because we have totally different food preferences. I chose mini-cheesecakes as our free dessert.

The order came a week later, well-packed in a heavily insulated box with a couple of large ice packs. I sincerely believe that it would have kept the food cold and safe for several hours in our blast-furnace Arizona summer weather. Luckily, we’re retired, so we were here to take it in immediately.

The meat comes in vacuum-packed pouches. The other ingredients are packed in sealed brown bags labeled with the name of the meal they’re part of. The produce is good-looking and fresh. Some of the other ingredients, like cream cheese and tomato paste, come in commercial plastic packaging. Most are well-sealed so they don’t break free, mingle with each other, or make a mess.

Some of the recipes are very simple; others are step-heavy and require babysitting. If you want a salad, you’re on your own for that.

The first order was a success. We skipped the next couple of weeks, and then I let Greg choose the meals for an order. He found five meals that he wanted to try. It’s a little daunting to try five new recipes in one week. I totally get why Katie limits herself to three meals per week. When the order came, it was short the freebie dessert we had ordered. I contacted Hello Fresh via their website. They apologized and said they would credit me $4.99 on my first non-discounted order. Bummer, but okay.

I skipped the next week or two, and then I realized I forgot to log in to skip another week. It was too late to cancel. I’m old, I forget stuff. Hello Fresh was already committed to sending me three meals of their choice. Not necessarily what I might have chosen, but okay. I went ahead and chose three meals for the following week.

When my third order came, all the meat was included, but the additional ingredients for one meal were missing. Our free dessert was also missing. This time I was ticked off. I contacted Hello Fresh, and they apologized, and said they would credit me $15 on my next non-discounted order. So basically, I got two meals for the price of three, plus some chicken I could use for a dinner from scratch. I would rather get an immediate partial refund so I could get the ingredients I needed from the supermarket (or better yet, special delivery of the missing ingredients, but I understand that’s not cost effective for them).

I cancelled my membership, including my order for the following week. That unleashed a stream of emails from Hello Fresh trying to get me to reconsider. I could be put on an every-two-weeks plan or a once-a-month plan. I eventually opted out of the emails. I can sign up again on their website if I want to, but I don’t want to.

Later, I discovered that earlier in the day they had sent out an email warning that some of their customers may not have received all their ingredients.

We ate our last Hello Fresh meal yesterday. It was good, but I’m glad to be done with them.

What I don’t like about Hello Fresh:

• The inconsistency of accuracy. This service would be amazing if they delivered exactly what was ordered, every time or most of the time. Out of my three orders, only one was complete.
• The pricing is not transparent. You don’t really know what you’re paying for your meals until you complete your order. The menu will tell you if there is an additional charge for the meal (for example, if you opt for the chopped chicken version of a recipe instead of the basic pork sausage one, or if you want a “premium” meal, which can cost up to $9.99 more per serving than a basic meal). But you can edit your order through the Sunday before your Friday delivery.
• Their website is not intuitive. I always had to search around for how to skip a week’s delivery, or how to contact Hello Fresh. I’m old. I’m a prime candidate for their service, because I like to simplify my life. They could make their website a little more elderly-friendly.

So, that was my experience with Hello Fresh. I’m trying not to rant, but to be completely honest and fair. Have you used them, or another meal service? What was your experience like? Tell us about it in the comments below.

Originally published at http://arhtisticlicense.com on June 1, 2024.