Have your say about what goes on the menu!

July 17, 2020

by Helen Eat

Contents

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 Beef Kofta recipe 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 succulent beef koftas would be transformed when paired with a classic fattoush salad, a Middle Eastern side that is studded with pita crisps.

Feedback suggested:

The frying instructions for the beef koftas weren’t clear, the koftas were dry and overall, the dish lacked flavour.

Phase two

What happened next:

Your feedback helped and more flavour was added to the dish. The chefs went back to the kitchen, altered the frying instructions, added some chermoula spice blend, and changed the salad (to help with increasing overall flavour!).

Feedback suggested:

The couscous salad was a little bland and needed more texture.

Phase three

What we changed to perfect the dish:

The chefs went back to the drawing board and added slivered almonds for extra texture and dollop of creamy yoghurt on top of the koftas. Success! The Beef Koftas have 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!