Meal box shops like HelloFresh are designed to save time and help people lead a healthier lifestyle. But a pepper currently shows the problem of the business model.
Recipe box senders such as HelloFresh or Marley Spoon are among the big lockdown winners. No wonder: restaurants have been closed across the board for months, and shopping for fresh groceries is anything but attractive. In my supermarket, the number of shopping trolleys was limited in order to control the flow of customers – with the result that there was a real banging and stabbing for the trolleys during Saturday afternoon rush hours. I do not feel like it. And because I know all the frozen dishes after a year working from home with two children, I recently subscribed to HelloFresh for a change.
The HelloFresh promise
The promises of “Germany’s number 1 cooking box” sound full-bodied: I would save time, money and above all stress with the food boxes, according to the website. The boxes are not only good for the wallet, but also for the planet. Sounds great.
I can’t confirm that the box is cheaper than a weekly shop, but it’s not much more expensive either. However, I consider the issue of sustainability to be a steep thesis. A lot of food is packed in plastic and individual bags, the food is delivered in normal vans and not in electric cars. In addition, the boxes with fish and meat are just as expensive as those with exclusively vegetarian products. The latter annoys me and shouldn’t exactly ensure that meat consumption – one of the biggest drivers of CO2 emissions – is reduced. But it’s fitting that the company shares sayings like “I really suspect people who are full after a salad” on Facebook.
Trouble about Paprikagate
But no matter which box you choose, they all seem to have one thing in common at the moment: the peppers are missing. Week after week you are currently receiving comfortingly worded e-mails that you actually want to pack peppers in the box, but due to extreme weather conditions at the beginning of the year “unfortunately there were many crop failures at our suppliers [kam] and we therefore exchange the ingredient at short notice [müssen].” Instead of yellow, green and red peppers, eggplants end up in my boxes.
I don’t like eggplant. And so the trouble began.
If an ingredient is not available – no problem. Offering a perfect product every week is hardly feasible. However, you should then find a suitable replacement. Not like in the case of the Mojo Rojo, which is basically just a tomato sauce with tomatoes instead of peppers. I can only speculate as to why HelloFresh offers recipes for weeks for which the ingredients cannot currently be guaranteed. Anyway, the #paprikagate, as a user aptly described it on the company’s Facebook page, makes me doubt the company’s practice.
The news from Berliners suggests that peppers are currently in short supply, like the shopping trolleys in my supermarket. But they are piling up in both the Penny and the Real around the corner from me. I can choose between organic and standard quality and sort the colors together as I wish. So it doesn’t seem like you have to have excellent connections in the food scene at the moment to get large amounts of peppers.
Watch the video: The best vegan curry – this is how you make it very easy with sweet potato strips.
Peppers are expensive
As always, it’s probably about the money. Because peppers are currently significantly more expensive than a few weeks ago. On the one hand, this is due to the strict corona requirements for harvest workers, and on the other hand to the cold snap in North Africa and Spain, which led to smaller harvests. However, a HelloFresh box for five days and three people per week costs 75 euros. The 70 cent surcharge for fresh peppers should actually be included.
When customers asked why they weren’t getting any peppers, the company didn’t comment on social networks. And instead even involuntarily pours oil on the fire: the company shared a picture puzzle on Facebook on Sunday, in which a section of a vegetable was shown. The social media team didn’t exactly show flair when showcasing the sweeping curves of a, you guessed it, bright red bell pepper. It wasn’t long before when asked what to see in the picture, the following response was posted: “The peppers that weren’t delivered.”
Delivery issues
If it were just the only slip-up, people would smile and ignore it. But the missing paprika stands for many things that don’t work. The spring onions were replaced with chives last week. On closer inspection, the “fresh herbs” were rather puny and dry. The tomatoes are still there, but pale and tasteless. In any case, I wouldn’t have packed them in the supermarket. The bananas for the banana pancakes a few weeks ago arrived overripe and mushy. When unpacking, my first thought was not “Hello, freshness” as the name suggests. Instead, I first had to wipe away the mud that splashed through the bag.
In addition, the products are handled so carelessly during packaging or transport that some of the ingredients in the bags break. A problem that apparently did not exist in the past and has only found its way into the past few weeks. Customer service usually reacts with sentence modules and credit notes for the next deliveries. But what if you don’t want it at all because the current one has already annoyed you?
In the end I have to go to the supermarket
I think the idea of HelloFresh is great. Personally, I think it’s worth the extra cost to have coordinated groceries delivered without annoyingly having to walk through the supermarket shelves. The recipes are varied and easy to understand. But if every time ingredients are missing or squished and I end up having to go to the supermarket, I end up getting more annoyed than happy about the time saved. And that for 75 euros per week.
Which brings us back to pricing. From what I’ve heard from colleagues, the meat isn’t always great, but it’s always of good quality. However, the vegetables occasionally appear as if they were B-stock from the wholesale market. High-quality ingredients such as sweet chestnuts, saffron-spice mixtures or similar, with which one could justify the identical price to the fish and meat box, are searched in vain in the veggie boxes. So for vegetarians like me, the box is only a deal if you don’t feel like opening a cookbook and looking for recipes.
Watch the video: How are the astronauts on the ISS actually supplied with supplies?
Oh yeah, when I hit the cancel button, HelloFresh tried to make me stay. For the coming week, they presented me with instagrammable prepared meatballs, hake on vegetable curry and – no joke – gratinated pointed peppers.
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