Why your HelloFresh reviews matter

December 2, 2019
by Toby Eat

    Say ‘hello’ to the dream team behind your HelloFresh dinners. From left to right there’s Sophie, Paddy, Bec and Helen. Between them, they have many years of experience in recipe development, food styling and recipe writing. 

    While they love being in the kitchen, cooking up a storm, nothing makes these cooking machines happier than hearing from you! Yes, our HelloFresh customers! That’s right, we’re spilling the beans on how our culinary team creates top-rated recipes every week. Read on, to get a taste of why your feedback is so important.

    Step 1: Recipe Development 

    Our Recipe Developers (pictured above) use customer feedback and ratings to better understand your food preferences like what kinds of veggies, carbs and spices you like in combination with chicken or beef and so on. After gathering this information, we create delicious recipes from fresh and seasonal ingredients – the kind of stuff you like! 

    Step 2: Recipe Testing 

    Our Recipe Testers take these newly developed recipes and cook them….multiple times…with lots of tastings and tweaking so that they’re just right before going on the menu! It’s an important part of the process as we make sure the flavours and taste is spot on and that the cook times are accurate and the recipes are achievable for our customers can be.

    Step 3: Recipe Editing 

    The Recipe Editors then put together the simple step-by-step instructions for your recipe cards, making sure they are fun, fresh and most importantly, easy to follow. They’ll talk you through any tricky techniques, make sure no instructions are missing, choose the best images to illustrate each step and check that all the ingredients you need are in the packing list for our team at the warehouse who ensemble your HelloFresh box. 

    Step 4: Data and lots of it! 

    Each week, our Culinary Operations and Analytics team collate all ratings and the customer feedback on the recipes. They share this information with the recipe developers who deep dive into any problem areas to ensure we’re constantly improving our dinners. Take for instance our Dukkah Chicken recipe. It’s been on the menu for the past six years and has undergone multiple tweaks in this time, all of which have been based on feedback from our customers. Now it’s one of our top rated recipes and customer favourites!

     

    Previous post
    Are you cooking your pasta properly? Are you cooking your pasta properly?
    Next post
    From box to plate in 15 minutes From box to plate in 15 minutes

    Related posts

    18 comments

    Lauren Tebbutt says:

    Hi Hello Fresh, Our order has not arrived today. This was to be our second delivery. On our first delivery last week I recieved a text message the morning of the delivery advising of an approximate delivery time. I did not receive any text message today. I waited until 6:30pm tonight and called up to find that apparently our order was saying ‘on hold’ at your end.
    I received a text on Thursday last week asking me to contact you as the courier was having trouble locating the address for todays delivery on the GPS. I did that straight away as soon as the text message came through. Your staff member added notes and assured me this was completed. Its now 8:30pm, we’ve had to order takeaway pizza get our children fed and we have no idea what is happening with our delivery. Not overly happy given this is only our second delivery.

    Maryanne Rees says:

    Hi Team,
    I went to make dinner tonight, Chinese Garlic Beef & Snow peas and I found the snow peas were mouldy inside the bag. The zucchini was also turning. I took photos if you’d like to see them.
    I also had two mouldy potatoes with this order which is very disappointing!
    Up until this point I have been happy with the quality of produce we have been receiving from Hello Fresh. Over the past month since I began ordering Hello Fresh, I have only every encountered one item (a mouldy capsicum) that wasn’t useable.
    Still, given that my delivery day is Sunday, and I went to use the potatoes on the Monday and the Snow Peas and Zucchini on the Wednesday, I believe this is completely unacceptable.

    Gidg Zealand says:

    Hello Fresh
    You site has great photos , is bright and attractive but useless when if come to replies on the support site. I just wanted to buy a gift card. The gift card site popped up and disappreared intantly. Tryed going to your HELPcentre I kept getting responsed that in no responded to what I was asking. Very frustated. Might just go and make up a box myself.

    Susan Johnson says:

    First delivery today. Creating first meal of honey soy glazed chicken and sesame fries.
    No snow peas in the pack, there was a Lebanese cucumber which my partner hates. So not a good start.

    Suzie says:

    Why are we using pineapple from thailand. We should be supporting australIan produce and australian farmers. If its not in season dont use that ingredient make food thats in season.. not happy!!!

    Donna says:

    I’ve been receiving HelloFresh for quite a few years now and have been happy with the meals.
    I have to ask WHY have you chosen to put the sour cream, mayonnaise, yogurt etc into plastic non resealable bags. They are difficult and messy to get all the contents out and reseal if you don’t use all of the ingredient at once. The cream and yogurt tastes a bit like plastic.
    I liked the small tubs better and at times have recycled them, they stack better in the fridge too.
    In my opinion I don’t think this was a wise move. Does anyone else agree with me?

    Rosalyn says:

    Wonderful web site. Plenty of useful info here. I¡¦m sending it to some friends ans additionally sharing in delicious. And certainly, thanks for your sweat!

    Rogis says:

    I would like to eat plant based meals most of the time. I now have a wonderful collection of recipes from the year i have been using your services. However there are now only two plant based options this week so i have to buy at least one meal that contains meat or fish.
    If i was a vegetarian i would have to stop using your services.

    There are many menus that could be either vegetarian or meat based. Just substitute beans, tofu, mushrooms or eggplant and allow customers to choose the vegetarian option.

    Karen says:

    Begeatables need to be fresher but variety good.

    Glenis Hutton says:

    There has been a big hiccup in our delivery which was to happen between 10am and 1pm today sat 18th Jan 2020
    had one message to say it would be arriving at 11.30 am ……..it is now 2.54 pm and there is no sign of it …….can you please enlighten me to what is happening

    Tracey says:

    Would love to see a few more low calorie dishes on offer per week. Apart from that the meals have all been lovely, fresh and tasty

    Vi says:

    Today I cancelled my subscription……….. why ???
    because although we are very impressed with you product, it is far too difficult to request what food we would like to be delivered and when.

    I cancelled previously because I do not accept you taking funds from my bank without my permission !!!

    Then I received an email from you offering a 40% discount……….. I opened it to view and the next day there was money taken from my account.
    Yes, it was delivered on the Saturday and yes it was very nice food, but……………………
    You cannot take money from my account !!!
    I had no idea I had ordered anything just by opening an email

    So I opened up you website to cancel for the following week and had a little play around your menu offers and yes, I am impressed, but
    I did actually hit the cancel button.
    The following day there was two lots of money taken from my account as I had obviously hit on one of the menus that was more expensive and not on the 40% discount offer.

    I rang through only to be advised I could not cancel as the order had gone through – but she would stop any further automatic orders from being sent onto me.

    Saturday comes and yes, I received the 2nd delivery !!!

    Today, Monday – I rang to confirm I had actually cancelled ALL or any future orders. NOPE
    They had been stopped until April !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
    Goodness how hard is it to stop you from taking funds from my bank ???

    I have hopefully now totally unsubscribed from Hello Fresh.

    Please be advised that this method of service is stopping people from enjoying your food and eventually word of mouth is going around from disgruntled customers.

    Hopefully you can make it clearer by using a ‘checkout’ method and your customers would be able to order what they actually want and pay the dollar value required.

    Diana says:

    I have also cancelled my subscription today (despite not signing up in the first place!!!!!

    The Hello Fresh meal plans are very time consuming to prepare and hence why I couldn’t continue after the trial. Plus the ingredients I received were not fresh (as how others have noticed as well) and I had to buy additional meat to add since the portion was not done right. Most importantly, forcing subscription by default after a trial is not a true trial.

    One of Hello Fresh intention is to help people with busy schedules and yet you expect every trial to turn into subscriptions without a phone call or text as a reminder, just immediate charge and tell “busy” customers like myself that I should have cancelled it earlier after a phone call to Hello Fresh the very next day. Explaining how you have “reminded” us 5 times in the subscription process – note that I did not sign up to subscribe continually but to TRY ONLY – fell on deaf and “robot” customer service staff. Repeating that you have “reminded” subscribers on how much we were INFORMED that we have to cancel by a certain day and time means pushing the responsibility as a business organisation to the customer when you have set up the rules and timeline for payment and cancellation, we as customers don’t get to make that choice. Despite I took the time to ring up and request for a full refund and explained how a it is meant to be a one time trial to try Hello Fresh if it fits our schedule, all was ignored and kept repeating back to me how I should have cancelled before the cutoff day and can’t offer a full refund.

    As many other customers have experienced, telling us you’ve already prepared the boxes and they have to be delivered is just meant you don’t care as a company even when the food is all going to waste as I cannot receive the box or cook anything for the week. Same as what others have experience, I didn’t order but there was another default choice made by Hello Fresh to pick the “popular” recipe choices for you.

    I am still expecting a full refund and I’d rather you donate the boxes that I DIDN’T order to OzHarvest or any organisations that will appreciate the free boxes to cook for the needy. Pro-organisation and boo-customer or non-existent “customer service” ending up with not a happy customer and we’ll never subscribe again.

    Jo Corliss says:

    Good Morning

    My last 3 deliveries, I have to say the fresh produce was far from fresh, tomatoes, green beans, cucumber etc were very soft and mouldy. My last order the pre cut pumpkin bag was already open which I was concerned about and the paper bags appeared to be just thrown together and squashed in the box. I’m waiting to see if my next order will be the same as there are other services available which are also cheaper and the quality of a higher standard.

    Very disappointed

    lee says:

    we have just recently come to Hello fresh, but I am so IMPRESSED! Hello Fish has restored the joy of cooking to me. Like many American families, we had fallen into a dinner meal “rut”, of the same bland meals almost every week, Hello Fresh and their varied and interesting meals have restored faith in our taste buds…

    Debbie says:

    Why are so many of your meals at an added cost ? ie $2.49 extra per serving etc
    Also I want to order a meal but not the lunch option but was’nt allowed without paying the extra $11.90 for lunch option.
    These 2 things limit the meal choices and make the menu options a lot more expensive.
    So far happy with program but with limited meal choices moving forward might need to reconsider.

    Tina Newell says:

    The last two weeks I have had to throw away the chicken in my order as it has gone off before the date on packaging.