Three Strikes Against Hello Fresh

For some reason we had a $30 off coupon to try Hello Fresh floating around the house. I have to admit, those meal delivery services look tempting. They always show a couple yukking it up in the kitchen, having the time of their lives mincing garlic and boiling pasta. That's how I should have known it was bullshit; no one likes mincing garlic. And Brent and I aren't quite at that point in our relationship where we work well together in the kitchen. I fell for gimmicky advertising, but I figured we'd save some money on groceries for a week, so let's get nuts.

The first strike against Hello Fresh was their website. I didn't think it was very user friendly or intuitive to any of the questions people trying their service for the first time would have. It was hard to tell if the meals we selected were in our cart, since there was no obvious indication. Any time we tried to get a question answered, we were redirected back to the meals page, to be even more confused. Also, the meal we were most excited about, roast duck with cranberry compote, was more expensive, which wasn't clear on the meal selection page, and only when we were at the checkout did we see there was a $10 upcharge.

The second strike was their shady cancellation policy. Okay, the policy itself isn't shady; in order to not be charged for the following week, you have to cancel five days before your next week of meals is shipped. Since we were just trying it because of the coupon, with no intention of keeping the service, we planned to call the day our box was delivered to cancel. Our kit was delivered last Friday and Brent went to his account to cancel, where they told him his plan would be cancelled after the next delivery. Brent called to explain that he was within the time frame of five days before our next shipment and the operator saw this and promptly cancelled the account with no more charges. But is that just their policy? To swindle another week out of people? Not cool.

The third strike was when I opened the kit and saw this teeny tiny bag of pasta. 

to get a better idea of my outrage, here's the tiny pasta bag next to a jar of peanut butter

I dumped out the rest of the kit, expecting to see another bag of pasta. Nope. This is meant to feed two adults. I know Americans portion sizes run big, but this was a whole new level of portion control. I had to swap it out with a box of penne we had in the pantry because I knew that six ounce bag of pasta wasn't going to cut it. The protein and veg sizes were good, but I guess pasta, being insanely cheap and all, is just too hard to send a decent serving of.

I could keep going with the strikes: 

-The finished meals are simply good. But they're things I can make on my own and be just as good, if not better. For what I'm paying, I want meals I'm going to be impressed by. 

-It's too expensive; with our $30 off coupon, we paid $30 for three meals, which sounds decent. But without the coupon, we're paying $60 a week for three meals. Maybe you're saving a longer trip to the supermarket, but you're paying for it, quite handsomely. 

-Honestly, I can't get over all the packaging. In good conscious to planet Earth, I couldn't continue with a meal service, even if I really liked it. The box it's delivered in and the refrigeration packets and all the packaging that comes with each meal; it really made me sad to see all that waste. A lot of it is recyclable, but it could just be avoided in the first place.

Hello Fresh just didn't do it for us. If you have a meal delivery service you love, let me know how much better it is than this one. And please lie to me about the amount of packaging used.