Worst managed company I've ever met
- I subscribed to a meal service set to start in a couple of weeks, for four weeks, for me and my wife. Four ready meals a day, five days a week, with a rotating menu every two weeks. Fixed daily calories (a little final touch-up for my busy body, my temple). Perfect.
- Half a week before the first delivery, Calori.fi gets in touch. All customers must re-enter their personal details and orders on a new website. The website is English-only, has no privacy policy, not even the company name. If you don’t comply, the order will be cancelled. As a trusting Finn, I go ahead and feed the site my personal details and card info. I don’t want the company cancelling my order just because I refuse to play along. Some might call that blackmail.
Customer service: “Yeah, sorry, we just launched the new website now.” As far as I know, there are actual laws that protect consumers from companies changing agreements unilaterally afterwards. But I humbly swallow the nonsense as a customer.
- The first meals arrive. Some are better, some worse. There’s a strange “oily” feel that’s a bit off-putting.
- While checking the order details and the menu for the next week, I notice that Calori has changed the “rotating every two weeks” setup to “same meals every week”, although customers can manually select alternatives. However, the selection has been drastically reduced and there are no longer enough different meals to cover two weeks. Customer service: “Customers asked for the same meals.”
Me: “Or maybe investors demanded increased efficiency?” At the same time, while I’m still on the phone with customer service, Calori closes the meal selection window for next week exactly 3 hours early.
So, we manage to get the selections in by creating an Excel sheet and emailing it to customer service.
Once again, I humbly swallow the nonsense as a customer. I agree with customer service to cancel the last two weeks and get a refund.
- The “modern system” requires customers to confirm delivery details twice a week, mainly to state that their detached house hasn’t magically turned into a block of flats. Naturally, changing the delivery time is not an option even if needed. I humbly swallow the nonsense as a customer.
- For meals that were already agreed on, I’m informed that some will be changed because “salads can’t be included on the final delivery days of the Mon–Wed and Thu–Fri cycles”. I humbly swallow the nonsense as a customer.
- I’m partying in the VIP area at Ruisrock on Sunday evening when I get a message: “We tried to deliver your order but failed.” Complete rubbish. I don’t believe a word of it. The meals are supposed to be dropped off contact-free at the front door of our detached house. No reason whatsoever to leave my family at home without food. I stop raving and contact customer service. They say, “Oops, we’ll inform the driver to try again.” The meals arrive sometime around 10pm. I humbly swallow the nonsense as a customer.
- I return from the festival, tired and hungry, ready to nourish my body. Then I notice the fridge is half full of the wrong meals: peas, falafel, and veggie stuff. Totally wrong dishes and on top of that, delivered with incorrect calorie limits. Now I’m really starting to lose it. I try to contact customer service. Apparently it’s a “training day”, which probably means a lie-in.
The previously agreed refund for the two cancelled weeks is paid at about 50 percent of the correct amount, with a baffling amount of confusion involved.
My ears are buzzing. Finally, I get hold of someone around midday. We manage to cancel the service immediately and get proper refunds arranged.
Not a single thing went right with this company. Not the products, not the service, not the terms.
As a customer, I ended up wasting a ridiculous amount of my own time sorting out problems and chasing either the service I paid for or the money I was owed. I have better things to do.
And this was supposed to be a service that makes everyday life easier and saves time.