Farm Fresh To You — Attraction in San Leandro

I am posting the feedback I sent to Farm Fresh To You so new customers can be aware of their terrible delivery service I just experienced:

“Hello,

I’d like to provide context as to why I will no longer use your services. I ordered raw chicken breast and other dairy perishables that needed to be refrigerated immediately and I was not informed when my delivery arrived. No email, no text, no phone call - absolutely nothing. I live in an apartment building, so I cannot constantly check my front gate to see when the order was delivered AND your website explicitly stated to logon to my account for status updates, which I did all day on Friday, April 17th.

It was only when I received a separate Amazon package notification that I came to my front gate only to find my Farm Fresh To You package had been sitting outside of my apartment building, with the ice cooler packages completely melted and my raw chicken was WARM. As you should know, raw chicken can only sit out for 2 hours max before bacteria grows, and it was obviously that the product I paid $10 is now rancid, dangerous and a waste of money. Your delivery service effectively endangered the product and could have endangered my health.

Your team really needs to get their delivery operations together. This is super unacceptable. There are many other farm direct services out there in the Bay Area (using the same farm vendors) and there’s no reason to support you guys if you can’t even deliver the product fresh or notify when the box is delivered. The only service you actually provide is to connect the farms to the customer, and you can’t even do that without spoiling the actual product. Why should I use your service when I can’t even trust that it will be delivered properly?

I wish you luck with your business but please know that I cannot and will not support the way you conduct your business in good...

The produce is generally pretty good. The prices are higher than going to the farmer's market. The meat is acceptable and fair to high for an organic farm (it is almost all frozen). The dairy is good but could be a bit fresher (milk is usually delivered with a week before it expires, at the store you can find it two or three weeks out).

That's the good. Here's the bad:

They have serious problems with delivering the right products. I would say about 70% of orders are missing items. That's right, seven out of ten deliveries have items that are missing. Once I got someone else's delivery with like $200 bucks of food in it. Last week we got two pounds of bananas that I didn't order. It isn't like the missing items are out of stock as they have a mechanism to tell you that on the website. The problem seems to be that the people packing the boxes aren't really good at getting items into the box. If it were once every couple of months it wouldn't be a problem; but this seriously happens almost every week. The food is expensive so it isn't something you want to let slide.

Missing items wouldn't be a big deal if they didn't charge you for the items that don't make it into the box; but that's not the case. Every order you have to go through the delivery and make sure everything showed up. If it doesn't show up it is on you to report it within 24 hours. To be fair, they are good at refunding you for missing items. Reporting stuff is a pain as the website is a bit hard to use. I really wish they could get it together and just deliver the right products, or tell me "hey we ran out of X, sorry, we didn't charge you for it." It would be a five star service is they could just get the right...

REBRAND: Farm fresh PESTS to you.

DO NOT BOTHER subscribing if you want convenience or good produce. They have neither. Signed up for a box of veggies and got a BOX FULL of PESTS. Emailed customer care as soon as the box was delivered. Did not get any reply for days. Decided to call them, the agent replies "the bugs/pest should come right off after you wash them."

I mean what's next? produce with soil? that will also come right off after washing, no? They expect me to clean a full box of produce thoroughly to remove pests. And what if I don't get one out? No one can take that risk with their family? I am not supposed to have pest control systems in my home, that's why I pay my share so you can do the growing and cleaning for me.

I did not take more pics of other produce because I thought this was an "honest organic eat well" brand that would be apologetic about a bad customer experience and process fair refund immediately like most other honest ethical companies do. They offered to refund the amount of the lettuce only which was like 3-4% of the value of the produce that was affected. They fail to understand it's not just about the lettuce. It's about:

Having to go thru so much trouble to wash "thoroughly" that takes up time, instead of convenience for which I paid a premium

Having to go to the grocery store to get actually good produce, wasting more time again

Having to deal with non-empathetic customer care via multiple modes of...