I am officially done. Between the AI recipes and the absolute circus that is Customer Care, HelloFresh has lost the plot. 💀
I’ve been a loyal customer for a while, but this week was the final absolute straw.
On Monday, my box was delayed. On Tuesday, the app changed to "Preparing a new box." By Wednesday afternoon, it was STILL sitting in the "Preparing" phase. Obviously, a box shipped mid-week is useless and will just overlap with next week's delivery.
When I went to report the issue, the automated bot slapped me with a pathetic $20 credit for an entire box of missing food. I escalated to a live chat agent, and they flat-out REFUSED a cash refund, claiming they "couldn't cancel a shipment in progress"—even though the tracking history proved the carrier hadn't even picked up the box yet. They expect us to pay full price for transit delays and just accept "invoice credits" like we don't have to go out and buy actual groceries to eat this week. The lengths they make you go through to get your own money back for food they failed to deliver is incredibly obnoxious.
I finally had to resort to calling their customer support phone line directly, where I was thankfully able to get an agent to finally process a full cash refund and a shipping voucher.
Honestly, though, it’s not even worth the fight anymore because the recipe quality has completely gone downhill. You can so clearly tell they are using lazy, unvetted generative AI to write these cards now.
Just this past month, I had a soup recipe that called for a whopping 1/4 cup of water (can't wait to eat my bowl of hot sludge), and a chili recipe that instructed me to sauté chopped jalapeños and white scallion parts for SEVEN MINUTES. Seven minutes!! My kitchen was a chemical warfare zone of aerosolized capsaicin and burnt onions.
I took my refund, used the voucher for one last box, and I am permanently canceling. Has anyone else noticed their customer service getting aggressively worse while the recipes turn into literal AI-generated nonsense?