Two months after we began staying home, you would think home grocery delivery options would have improved. They had major problems when I first wrote about home delivery. But I just tried Imperfect Foods hoping it would be more reliable. Sadly, it was not and I ended my subscription after only one delivery.
The concept behind Imperfect is a worthy one — to use produce that might not look the best but is perfectly edible, preventing it from going to waste. Demand for it was so high in April, when my daughter told me she uses it, that I could not open an account until May. When I did, though, I found it’s having the same problems larger food retailers are.
It also had a problem I hadn’t encountered before — it simply couldn’t deliver anywhere near when it promised. It originally gave me an eight-hour delivery window — from noon to 8 p.m. In normal times, that would have been unacceptably long to me, but these days I have nowhere to go so I accepted it.
But when 8 p.m. and then 9 p.m. came and went on delivery day without any food, I emailed to find out how late I would need to stay up for my delivery. The answer — it wasn’t coming until the next day, with another eight-hour delivery window. Lucky I wasn’t counting on that delivery to make my dinner the night it didn’t come.
The next day, as time passed I wondered what was happening — until I received an email saying it would be yet another day before my delivery arrived. A delivery two days late is unacceptable to me, especially because I had ordered a meat and seafood add-on to my veggies and wondered where those all were sitting for two days. Continue reading “Imperfect Foods: an imperfect answer to Covid-19 grocery delivery”
