But when shoppers who indicated less than full satisfaction with their online order were asked to name the department where quality fell short, 26 percent indicated meat.
Hmmmm, seems we had a few complaints with one particular company.
Does this include all the online sources of purchase? The packaged meal services, online Wal Mart and other grocery store online orders, places like Snake River Farms and Creekstone Farms?
Which company did we have complaints about I must have missed that topic?
Meat is the one thing that I have found that I almost always have to see before I buy. The exception would be buying a Wagyu product from say SRF, but that's such a rarity. I've been pleased and disappointed too many times, in other words it's totally inconsistent. Coupled with the fact that meat is an easily spoiled commodity makes it high on the disatisfaction list via home delivery. I got a good butcher and a very good local grocery, call me picky but I'm satisfied getting in the truck, driving a couple of miles and choosing my own.
We have a local meat locker I like to frequent. Something to being able see and inspect before you buy. Guess that is why I still don’t have an amazon prime account yet either.
I would never trust someone picking out my meat choices for me at a grocery store. However with that being said I buy a lot of case lots of ribs, pork butt, and brisket and tri tip from a local food service company sight unseen. I've never been disappointed. A couple times I've had to trim a brisket or tri tip a bit more than I would have liked to but considering how much I have purchased from them over the last 5 years or so it's negligible.
I have ordered from about 6 different online merchants. I have had a couple orders that arrived thawed and too warm but the companies quickly replaced the items.
The quality of meat I have received from these merchants has all been much better than anything I can get locally. I can see people getting upset with meat that comes thawed or something like that but I have a hard time believing people have an issue with the quality of the product. Would be very interesting to see a breakdown of complaints by merchant. I would guess Omaha Steaks would have many more complaints than Snake River in relation to the total orders.
We have heard complaints more about the packaging and shipping than any about the quality of the meat. And that particular company has been very ready to issue full refunds on almost any complaint. I know, I complained about one package in a shipment of many packages being broken, and they refunded the entire purchase which I wasn’t asking for.
YES! Always! When I literally see an unplugged deep freeze in the back of an old beat up truck pulling into my driveway I just start to cringe. I feel bad for the folks doing it who are just trying to make a living but somebody eventually buys I guess.
I have ordered numerous times from SRF without issue. Last time I ordered a 6lb pork belly among other things. The pork belly was on the bottom when I pulled it out I couldn't believe my eyes! That thing came in just under 13lbs! I double and tripled checked and I only got billed for the 5 to 6lb belly. They only offer one pork belly option and that is the 5 to 6lb so I don't know how I got that monster.
But everything always arrived frozen and well packaged. SRF just did recently change their packaging procedure. You can read about it here. https://www.snakeriverfarms.com/packaging
Personally I don't like the fancy branded outside box. Tempts to many hands along the way to maybe lose the box in their freezer at home. Unless they put that inside another plain box I guess they don't specify that.
Frozen Smoke For this review I will probably just cook it in the oven since that is what most people will do and I want the review to help as many as possible. But in the future I definitely want to try smoking one,
JoeSousa did you get around to cooking that ham? I'm on the fence about buying a whole ham from SRF for Christmas dinner and would like to hear how you liked yours.
Frozen Smoke I did cook it up. Overall it was better than a normal ham. The texture was much more like real meat that most grocery store hams. There was a very slight corned beef taste and texture to it, especially when I fried up some leftovers. I cooked mine plain but it might benefit from a bit of a glaze or some more seasoning on the outside.
I've been very happy with what I have gotten from SRF and Crowd Cow. Most deliveries in the cooler part of the year.
I will say this about shipping and ambient temperatures: I send off rinse samples for microbial testing 2-3 times a month. If the ambient temperatures are 90 or higher, you'd better up your ice packs by 50% or else the sample will not be sampled due to hot temp's. Never happened in 2017, occurred numerous times this summer.
My last Crowd Cow delivery sucked. I bought a tri-tip (was puny at best, like 1.5#) and what I thought were 4 flat iron steaks of reasonable size. Reasonable turned out to be about 5 ozs. each. So I ended up with about 2.5# of meat for like $65 or so, not a good deal. Add to that their shipping slip ups and I've turned sour on those guys.
In 1983 I had to supervise the work party onboarding pantry stores when we docked in the Philippines. The cardboard boxes were marked 'GSA Experimental Beef Contract # xxxxxxx'. That amused me, and scared me, as did the directions - "remove from packaging before cooking".
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