After a hiatus from Home Chef to try other meal kit companies, this is my first box after coming back.
Customer service took care of it though.
The bottles are brand new in the picture, but are still mostly full over 3 months in, and I am a major spice person - using them on a large variety of things I prepare. I've used them in soups, homemade bread, meats, cerrain veggies, and so on.
I first fell in love with their four pepper blend (not pictured), which is my favorite, at a local pizza shop in DC. After buying it for myself and using it all up, I took advantage of a good sale they had to try 5 of their other spices. I might just go back to the original after this for at least a while or try their other ones, but these are all worth a try and delicious as well.
I took inventory of the unorganized mess of ingredients that partially fell out of that little cardboard container. This time I'm missing:
*all of the grass-fed ground beef with no replacement and zero notification about this
*the parsley (no notification)
*half an ounce of cheddar cheese when the recipe calls for 2 oz and I get 1.5 oz instead
*the focaccia bread is replaced with *one* torn-up ciabatta roll instead with zero notification.
I also have 2 damaged peaches and random container of hoisin sauce that doesn't belong to any of the recipes.
All 4 recipes I ordered were affected negatively this time.
Also, after cutting into all 4 peaches for the pie, I was supposed to make, I found that they were all inedible!! Even the undamaged ones had hardened, porous flesh with no good peach flavor at all. I had to replace all the peaches myself.
Live human customer service is absent on weekends, so I will have to wait until Monday. I want to have a live phone call with a human agent, no more slow-poke emails. Their AI agent said it made a support ticket.
No more credit refunds. I want all the refund on my original payment method.
I wish I hadn't given them another chance because I wanted to try their possibly more interesting recipes. I've already cancelled my subscription a few days ago. No more. I should've stopped at the first and only order with them.
They waited until the one day before my first box is to be delivered to finally notify me that their supplier failed to give them the salmon portion so that is going to be missing from my box as the main ingredient for one of my meals. Not only that, but instead of refunding me the cost of that salmon to my original payment method, they gave it as a store credit instead. I had to get in a chat with customer service to get it back on my card.
They couldn't at least say anything to me during processing before the box was even shipped, couldn't offer substitutions, nor a refund back to my original payment method the first time?
That was my first and only chance on them, regardless of how good these meals turn out when they come. Also, I just found out that I am asked to have more ingredients on hand than other meal delivery services ask for and already provide, like flour, red wine vinegar or white white vinegar, and so forth.
This will be my first and last box from them.