Have your say to have dinner your way

March 11, 2020
by Helen Eat

Have you ever fallen in love with a HelloFresh meal that’s cooked to perfection and bursting with flavour… and then never see it on the menu again? Or have you ever been a little underwhelmed by a meal, only to see the exact recipe back on the menu a month later?

You’re probably thinking MAMA MIA, why do they do this to me? 

Here’s what goes on behind the scenes

Your customer reviews and ratings are used in our recipe development process to determine what makes it onto the menu! 

The HelloFresh Culinary team reads every individual comment and uses the recipe’s average star rating to determine if it stays or goes!

They then create positive and negative themes, and re-group with cleansed palettes (and minds), and go on to use your feedback to tweak and improve recipes. The changes can be as small as increasing half a stock cube to a full stock cube, or as major as swapping corn to cucumber. 

Why is a four star rating so important?

  • We’re quick to delete recipes if our customers don’t like them! A recipe that scores below 3.45 gets wiped from the menu straight away.
  • If a recipe scores higher than a 3.45 it’s not quite in safe ground yet, and goes back to the test kitchen for tweaking.
  • Once a recipe scores 4 stars and we’re sure you’re satisfied, our team is happy! And you’ll see that meal back on the menu again soon.

The evolution of a recipe!

Take our Dukkah Chicken for example. It has been tweaked and tested multiple times over the years, thanks to the feedback from our loyal customers. It’s now one of our high-performing recipes. Let’s take a look!

Phase one

In the beginning: 

  • The Culinary team thought the humble chicken breast would be transformed when coated with dukkah and paired with a simple salad. 

Feedback suggested: 

  • The frying instructions for the chicken weren’t clear, the chicken was dry and overall, the dish lacked flavour. 

Phase two

What happened next: 

  • Your feedback helped and more flavor was added to the dish. The chefs went back to the kitchen, altered the frying instructions, added a capsicum relish, increased the dukkah and changed the salad (to help with increasing overall flavour!).

Feedback suggested: 

  • The capsicum relish was a little bland and didn’t complement the dish.

Phase three

What we changed to perfect the dish:

The chefs went back to the drawing board and swapped the capsicum relish to dill and parsley mayonnaise. Success! The Dukkah Chicken has since performed extremely well and established itself as a customer favourite.

So if dinner was super tasty and you’d like to see it on the menu again, give it four stars. And if you think your meal could be improved, be sure to tell us why! 

Key for star rating:

1 star = Wiped from the menu 

2 star = I wouldn’t choose this meal again

3 star = It was good but a few tweaks would make it better

4 star = As good as it gets! It couldn’t get any better 

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1 comment

Patricia Monaghan says:

Hi Hello Fresh, My meals have been lovely, but can I just choose my own meals instead of having them chosen for me? I cannot eat some things like black beans and some fish. so is that ok.
Thank You.