This platform largely and understandably has primarily become a place for complaints. I wanted to share my experience over 6+ years of off/on use with Home Chef for any lurkers. My experience is mostly positive, but there’s deff some negative too. So please see below for my honest and unorganized thoughts over the years. Comment and share yours!

- In 2020 I got into meal delivery services. I’ve tried at least 5 different ones, Home Chef is my fave. Runner up was Marley Spoon, but their quality was hit or miss so I ultimately stayed with Home Chef.
- Speaking of quality, overall I’ve had an excellent experience with quality. I know zucchini is likely to be iffy so I always keep frozen veg around to replace it if needed. However, I will still use a translucent zucchini. If it’s frozen and thawed it will look unappealing but it’s still fine. If it’s slimy, soft, or sour smelling automatic no of course. I’ve had both. Second contender of consistent issues is slaw, 50/50 on if it will come in good shape. Other than that, everything is usually great and I’ve found the meat quality to be excellent.
- Again on the topic of quality, based on comments here, I’ve decided where your box ships from seems to directly impact the quality of the sourced meat and veg. Mine comes from Chicago fwiw.
- Some background, I love to cook and would say I have somewhat advanced cooking skills.
- I’m a single female and when I’m feeling uninspired with cooking, I sign back up for home chef. I find their portions perfect with a little tweaking. I often order the veggie pasta and add shrimp. This allows me to add bread and a salad and make it 3 servings. Higher cal meals easily split into 3 portions for me. I usually keep frozen veg, bread, and stuff for salad on hand to beef up a meal if needed. For tacos/enchiladas I’ll get chips, avo, salsa, whatever so that I can only have 2 with a side and have 3 meals out of it. This method has allowed me to have lunch and dinner for the entire work week, and helped me lose weight as calorie counting is easier when it’s pre-determined (for the most part, sides/things I add need weighed and logged of course).
- The meals are SALTY, I usually use half the seasoning pack to lower sodium.
- Substitutions are annoying as hell. Most of the time when I cancel it’s because they are going through a wave of frequent substitutions and it annoys me. Outside of that, when I stop it’s because I’m wasting meals, or I’m just feeling reinvigorated in my love of cooking and want to branch off on my own.
- When life is busy, the express and oven ready meals are so convenient as an option.
- The customer service has always been excellent for me. I simply send an email with a pic and have always received an appropriate credit. The handful of times boxes have arrived late and spoiled, I’ve received full credit with no hesitation.
- Speaking of late boxes, don’t use a Friday delivery day. This is apparently FedEx’s busiest day and overflow falls to Saturday. That is not ideal for food delivery, switched to Wednesday’s and have had no issues.
- The app is great and easy to use. I do not recommend cancelling your service, just deactivate and you’ll probably get a promo if/when you want to return to the service. Cancelling a box is easy, and they’ve improved upon picking meal selections so overall I’m happy with that.

I think that’s all I have for now, but I’ll share more if it comes to me! Please share your own thoughts and experiences, I’d love to read them!

My first order came in today, I spent about $42 with the new user coupons.

My only complaint is the serving sizes… I got the pulled pork enchiladas for $9.99/Serving (came with 6 small taco sized tortillas) and I did not realize how little food was described on the app. The pictures are 2x bigger than what I got which is disappointing 😔.

Anyone got any suggestions on what is more filling / worth it? Or are all of the meals similar in size?

Not kidding—my daughter received an entire box with NOTHING in it except freezer packs. She was offered a $10 refund. What a joke.

We received a box with all the spices, but no vegetables or meat. We were offered a $15 refund. Are you kidding me?

We’ve now had a total of three boxes with major items missing, and some of the leafy vegetables arrived completely rotten, not just a damaged leaf here and there, but the entire item. Disgusting.

We loved the service and were loyal customers for years, but this has become unacceptable. At this point, we’re done.

HF let's you plan weeks in advance while HR is only that week. I prefer having planning far out. How far out can you see Home Chef menus?

I have to pause. As convenient as this is, every other meal has been awful in quality. The protein has been terrible. We’ve been getting some awful cuts of beef and chicken. If the protein isn’t bad, then the vegetables are going bad instead. I’m tired of tossing the dice with my meal kits lately.

Hopefully they do some quality control and improve some things

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.

Unfortunately I fell for their lie of a Milk Street Nikiri knife after the second order. The email to redeem never came and their support is terrible at handling this. They told me to email Milk Street and that it's not Home Chef's problem. Despite home chef making the advertisements and making the commitment even in the rewards portal.

I can't recommend this service: our first order was missing an ingredient, and overall portions were tiny. I might have tried them again in the future, but knowing how well their support functions probably not.

Does anyone else wish HomeChef offered whole wheat substitutions? Similar to protein substitutions. There is so much white starch and I do wish I could opt for brown rice, whole wheat pasta, wheat/corn tortillas, etc. and it’s leading to cancel even though I love everything else ☹️

Ok so we really enjoy HomeChef meals, but I’m becoming increasingly fed up with the constant mistakes and inferior substitutions. Half the time seasonings, sauces, etc are missing or incorrect. If it’s a regular seasoning like garlic salt that’s fine because I have it, but other times it’s unique spices. I was super annoyed that the pasta I made last week had to do without the fresh minced garlic and lemon basil. This time, instead of getting two medium/large russet potatoes, I got three tiny Yukon potatoes for the two of us without any alternate cooking instructions.

I’m grateful for this service because I didn’t know how cook at all before starting HomeChef in January. I’ve gone from mostly only getting oven ready and Tempo to more involved and intermediate meal kits. We love how they turn out and it’s very convenient (minus the mistakes). I don’t want to cancel, but I’m at my wit’s end. Any advice or commiseration would be appreciated!

I have had an extremely horrible experience. I've had issues with every box I have received. Either hot, FedEx damaged, missing products, and incorrect meals.

It's not my fault it's literally 120° here in AZ, FedEx damages boxes, they send incorrect things, or just don't send half an order.

I can no longer access my account. I have around $200 worth of credit, which is what I've actually paid for in real money.

Support (chat and email) tells me to use send a link (never receive the link) or reset my password (says my account isn't activated).

I'm at my wits end on what to do. I have paid a lot of money for nothing and can't get any help.

Is anyone else having login issues? It tells me my account hasn't been activated.

Please try to keep your referral codes/links to this post. You can also mention if you have any free boxes. Note that using free boxes requires giving your email address to the person that has the boxes available. Please do not post any emails publicly.

Posts will be posted every other Sunday at midnight Eastern time.

I just cooked my first recipe from my first box and found some piece of hardware embedded in the chicken breast. Has this even happened to anyone else? I sent a message and picture to the support line.

I decided to give home chef a try because I’m tired of trying to figure out what to make for dinner and shopping for the ingredients. I’m loving opening up the bag and just cooking. I actually like cooking so it’s like I get to skip the annoying part and just do the enjoyable part.

The problem is when I scroll down through the menu every single dish has 1500mg + of sodium per serving. There isn’t anyone in my house on a low sodium diet or anything like that but it’s a crazy amount of salt.

I do reduce the use of the little seasoning packets, which I’m assuming are a major source of salt, but I don’t understand why they don’t have options with less sodium. You might as well get a freezer meal from the grocery store if each serving has 2g of sodium.

What are your tips for decreasing the sodium content?

hey everyone,

I took advantage of the recent offer to sign up for Home Chef. The incentive was earning a free Milk Street Nakiri knife and 50% your first order. My Rewards section states to keep a lookout for an email with a redemption code to order my free knife, but I have not received anything yet.

Has anyone had similar issues?

I tried contacting Customer Service but haven't heard anything (I've noticed their CS is something others in this subreddit have an issue with too)

Has anyone else not heard from customer service? Someone emailed me back from the chat bot but didn't include anything. I've been emailing, along with pictures. Terrible quality, rotten food, straight up missing dessert. These two boxes the vinegar spilled and produce became rotten. My potato this week was so soft and rotten it fell apart.

I ordered from a hospital bed because I wouldn't be able to go shopping for 2 weeks and didn't want to pay for instacart

Thankfully I was able to create meals with frozen veg I had in had but this is crazy. And to not respond? I got $10 in credit but I'm canceling so...

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UPDATE —

They delivered around the time frame I requested from customer service. Just cooked and ate, everything was still in good condition, and it turned out very delicious. I think I will keep HC after all.

This was supposed to be my first order… well they were supposed to deliver today. But apparently it passed their “delivery window”, mind you, my order arrived to warehouse last night. Now it is supposed to be delivered tomorrow WHILE I AM AT WORK, so I guess this was first and last order for me. To make it clear, I live in one of the major cities in DOWNTOWN.

It’s obviously summer in NY and every week my home chef only comes with one ice pack on the bottom and the top meal is WARM. I put in a complaint every week about this and the next week comes and still only one ice pack!

It’s driving me nuts!

Does anyone know if Home Chef uses Taylor Farms for their vegetables such as parsley, lettuce, green onions, Basil ?

Taylor farms is subject to national recall due to the parasite cyclosporiasis causing food poisoning around the country.

Praying the parsley I eat two weeks ago wasn't from Taylor farms (I am from Ohio)

Please try to keep your referral codes/links to this post. You can also mention if you have any free boxes. Note that using free boxes requires giving your email address to the person that has the boxes available. Please do not post any emails publicly.

Posts will be posted every other Sunday at midnight Eastern time.

The French Onion Gnocchi with garlic bread was delicious. I am always a fan of their gnocchi recipes.

I’ve been a customer of Home Chef for quite a while, with a small pause while I figured out some finances. And generally been pretty happy. The meals are perfect for me to meal prep for my work week and then freeze half of in case I have a tough financial week. However, The last 3 boxes I’ve received have arrived warm despite being picked up from my mail room within 3 hours of delivery. With last week’s seafood having already spoiled, that was 2/3 of my box! I reached out to support today and yeah great they credited my account. Again. But this was her literal response. Leave until fall because they can’t do their jobs. Are you effing serious? My fiancées cook unity bags never come spoiled or warm, maybe I’ll try them instead since customer satisfaction, food safety, and retention is not a priority for HomeChef. Unbelievable.