Hello Fresh - duped into signing up for 20 meals for a family of 5

Emmia

Grumpy_chap said:

enginestar said:

I didn't even get to choose ANY of the meals being delivered.

I understood the whole model of Hello Fresh was that you don't get to choose the meals but it is all built around "sustainability" so you get the ingredients to cook up meals based upon the recipes provided for the selection (by Hello Fresh) of available and in-season ingredients for the delivery.

You choose the meals from a list, or they make a selection, but the meals vary from week to week or month to month, and there is seasonality - but it's not about sustainability per se.

For example on 17 April, we have the following meals they've selected for us:

Butter Chicken & Basmati Rice with peas and flaked almonds

Classic beef mince cottage pie, with cheese and sauteed peas

Stir fried honey sesame pork noodles with tenderstem broccoli and carrot ribbons


They're all fine options, but I expect we'll switch at least one of them for something like:

Peri peri chicken thigh tray bake with roast potatoes and a tomato and pea shoot salad or 

Indian inspired crusted sea bass with mustard seed potatoes, green beans and zesty mayo or 

Roasted aubergine and chickpea curry with toasted coconut rice and yoghurt.


Or something else from the selection...

mr_stripey

Grumpy_chap said:

enginestar said:

I didn't even get to choose ANY of the meals being delivered.

I understood the whole model of Hello Fresh was that you don't get to choose the meals but it is all built around "sustainability" so you get the ingredients to cook up meals based upon the recipes provided for the selection (by Hello Fresh) of available and in-season ingredients for the delivery.

you choose the meals a week ahead or whatever. If you don't choose, HF will choose for you.

 I think convenience is the main selling point. You get the exact quantities required of ingredients for each meal.

You get a weeks worth (or whatever) of "meals" delivered in a box with everything you need to make them

I've had them before on and off. Decent value with an offer. 

TELLIT01

Sorry but you haven't been duped.  You allowed somebody else to complete the form and didn't bother to check anything before it was sent.  Your fault, nobody else.

Vectis

You're probably going to receive what you signed up for - or what you allowed yourself to be signed up for.

Most of us do a major food shop once a week and stock up on food for that week. If you've got a family of five, how many 'portions' of food would you be expecting to have in your fridge if you shopped at the supermarket? A week's worth of meals for 5 people. Isn't that exactly what you've agreed to?

But, like others have said, just cancel any ongoing subscriptions if you don't want to continue with the service, enjoy the food you've been sent, and don't hand over your phone to strangers to order stuff on your behalf.

jon81uk

Grumpy_chap said:

enginestar said:

I didn't even get to choose ANY of the meals being delivered.

I understood the whole model of Hello Fresh was that you don't get to choose the meals but it is all built around "sustainability" so you get the ingredients to cook up meals based upon the recipes provided for the selection (by Hello Fresh) of available and in-season ingredients for the delivery.

You do get to choose the meals, there will be 20-30 options each week and you pick 3-5 of those meals to be delivered, each meal will then be for 2-5 people depending what size you have chosen. If you don't like any of the options then cancel the box and you skip that week, but fail to choose by the deadline for the week and it will choose for you.

Seems the OPs issue was allowing someone else to do it for them therefore not getting to choose the number of meals.
They stated they only want one but that is not possible or economical as the cost of delivery for one days ingredients is not worthwhile, hence needing to get at least 3.

Exodi

enginestar said:

Or am I the mad one here?

Respectfully, yes, you seem to be the mad one.

I use HelloFresh all the time and it simply sounds like you're getting 5 different meal kits to make a meal for 4 people. It sounds a bit silly when you rant about a meal for 20 people - it's not going to be one enormous kit with ingredients to make a single dish for 20 (and HelloFresh have told you this), it's going to be five separate bags each with their own recipe and ingredients.

Delivering one individual meal kit would be prohibitively expensive.

You also make a point about "4 (meal kits) having to go into storage", like this is a massive inconvenience or effort - but this is how normal customers use HelloFresh... you order a weeks worth of meals, they arrive in a big box, and inside is 5 smaller bags that you put in the fridge. It takes maybe a shelf in a fridge. If you were shopping and making the meals from scratch you'd be using that space anyway?

enginestar said:

I want to know if I refuse delivery and request a refund from my card... where do I stand with that?

They've said to me that if I get a refund from my bank that they will 'pursue' this - so I'm guessing they will take the matter to court?

The total charge is £37. They've given a refund of £10. So total paid will be £27.

Just FYI, chilled food deliveries like this are different to normal deliveries in the sense they are express services and effectively have to be delivered. They will leave it outside your house if there's no answer, and they are not allowed to take the goods back to depot (it's plastered all over the box). It's obvious why as the chilled perishable goods would not last very long once the ice packs inside have melted while sat in a sorting office floor.

If you tried to refuse, expect from ruining an innocent delivery drivers day, I think they'll insist they are not allowed to take it back to depot.

£27 for 20 portions is very good value, honestly except for not picking the meals (which you could have), I really don't know what the problem is. It also sounds like you've already kicked up a storm to the HelloFresh customer service team.

I'd cancel any future deliveries and perhaps make a mental note to not sign up to things you don't understand in the future. For what it's worth, I think you've got a pretty good deal here, so it feels a bit unfair to use words like 'duped' and threaten chargebacks when they operate a perfectly legitimate business with many happy customers (myself included - about half our meals are HelloFresh, have been for a few years now).

eskbanker

The thread is nearly a year old and the OP has long gone - I think someone else resuscitated it earlier but the posts have been deleted, leaving the above as the outlier....

Exodi

eskbanker said:

The thread is nearly a year old and the OP has long gone - I think someone else resuscitated it earlier but the posts have been deleted, leaving the above as the outlier....

Doh, sorry...

born_again

eskbanker said:

The thread is nearly a year old and the OP has long gone - I think someone else resuscitated it earlier but the posts have been deleted, leaving the above as the outlier....

Yep. Quite a few posts 🤷‍♀️

Alderbank

It's not against the rules though and in this case it generated several posts from different points of view which I found interesting and useful.