Free Food…. Gone!

I’ve posted a few times lately about the various Food Boxes we’ve been ordering. These have been from the likes of Gousto, Hello Fresh and MyCookbox. We even had a Hello Fresh Christmas Dinner Box.

The End of MyCookbox
The End of MyCookbox

Food Box Referrals

For the most part we only buy them when we have a special offer or we have enough credit in our account from referrals. With most of these companies, if you refer other people to them and they buy a box using your referral code, not only do they get a reduced price box, but we get some credit in our account as well. This would get us a free box now and then and free food can never be sniffed at.

Free Food Galore

This was all going well, until one day something happened to one of my blog posts and we suddenly had about 5 referral credits from MyCookbox in one day. That was enough credit for a couple of free boxes – Exciting stuff. The next day we had a similar number of credits. Things were looking up we now had enough credit to keep us in free food for a few weeks!

I can only assume that the blogpost with our referral link in was trending somewhere. This then continued for quite a while. It started to get a little silly really. We were getting enough credits everyday for a weeks worth of food. Even I can’t eat that much! The credit was just accumulating in our account so we left it there as the referrals were bound to dry up eventually. Before long we had over £1000 credit. I decided that if it continued like this for much longer that we’d have to start ordering boxes and giving them to charity. We started having a box every week ourselves which was quite a treat and still the credit continued to grow.

And so it Stops

Things were still going strong until MyCookbox changed the way their referral code system worked. The referral deal remained the same but they changed the mechanics behind it and the actual referral code that people would need to use to link to our account was changed. People following the popular link no longer fed into our account and the referrals dried up. No doubt MyCookbox were still getting the new customers from the link, it;s just that we were no longer being credited for it. I changed the links in my posts to the new code and we still got one or two here or there but it was back to its usual levels. Oh well, we couldn’t really complain as we now had over £1600 of credit in our account which would keep us in free food for more than a year!

And then it’s Taken Away Completely

We cancelled a couple of boxes over the Christmas period as we would have the Hello Fresh Christmas box and wouldn’t be needing the MyCookbox as well. They were due to start again on December 29th and we were looking forward to a year of MyCookbox boxes arriving every week. Hopefully we’d save some money on grocery shopping too.

And then we received this email from MyCookbox:

Life is made up of bittersweet moments, and MyCookBox has come to an exciting crossroad that can only be described as just that: Bittersweet.

As of December 30th 2018, MyCookBox will cease to trade, with final deliveries on the 29th (caution: emotional rollercoaster coming your way!). However, this sad news is accompanied by an exciting one: MyCookBox will then be joining the HelloFresh family.

MyCookbox Credit
MyCookbox Credit

A ‘Rollercoaster’ ride indeed. The excitement of referral credits, disbelief as our credit grew, and then disappointment as it has all been taken away. Apparently they won’t honour the credit in our account and it can’t be transferred to our Hello Fresh account – basically the credit will just be lost. So much for our year of free boxes and grocery savings. I guess we haven’t lost anything but there was over £1500 in our account when this happened and that has just been wiped out so we do feel a little cheated.

We did after all refer lots of people to MyCookbox. Their data and accounts will now be transferred to Hello Fresh. Hello Fresh will therefore benefit from our referrals. We however won’t. Bittersweet hey! Not helped by the fact that we bought the Christmas box from Hello Fresh as a treat safe in the knowledge that we’d be saving money in the New year. We might not have done so if we had known our free food afterwards would be stopping. So, Hello Fresh got two Christmas presents from us while ours was taken away completely.

Let’s just hope the final delivery that we get on the 29th is a good one. It’ll then be back to grocery shopping and paying for our dinners as usual. Unless of course we can convince Hello Fresh to honour some of our MyCookbox credit.

2 Responses

  1. Avatar forComment Author Mum x says:

    They should honour at least some of it ….Maybe you’ll have to pass the word on to not buy from them!….I have already cancelled mine and told Food box to delete all my data and not to pass on to Hello fresh ,in protest on yout behalf .

  2. Avatar forComment Author Emily says:

    Ah how gutting! What a shame when you were doing so well, and then not to get to use any of the free credit at all! Grrr.

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Alan Cole

Alan is a Freelance Website Designer, Sports & Exercise Science Lab Technician and full time Dad & husband with far too many hobbies: Triathlete, Swimming, Cycling, Running, MTBing, Surfing, Windsurfing, SUPing, Gardening, Photography.... The list goes on.