Thank you ALL for checking out our Imperfect Foods Review from March of this year! We have received so many comments and messages asking about the ins and outs and if we’re still with Imperfect Foods after some pretty awful first experiences. The short answer is YES! We are still using them.

If you read our review, you’ll know already that we have not been without some major hiccups with their company and honestly in an effort to eliminate food waste, we had to get crafty with our orders. I can positively say that we have made it to mostly calm waters these days and are happy with their service!

Just like the art of couponing comes with reinventing your grocery runs, ordering through Imperfect Foods comes with a bit of re-imagining as well. Here are the tricks we use EVERY WEEK when ordering with Imperfect Foods.

We stick to batch orders. This allows us to order all of our meat one week, our fruits and vegetables another week. This has DRASTICALLY reduced our smashed product.

Imperfect Foods order Week One:
Meat, Some dry goods, some fruits

We stock up on our meats this week! Chicken, Fish, Bacon, Grass-Fed Ground Beef, Lamb, Fish, even “no-meat” meat alternatives that we want to try. We typically try to get as much as our freezer needs to last us 2-3 weeks.

We usually add soft packed dry goods to this week as well. Such as: pasta, rice, oatmeal, etc. There’s not much of a chance for these to break and they’re usually packaged separately from the meat JUST IN CASE there’s any “meat juice spillage” (this has literally never happened, but has always been a concern of mine for contamination).

We feel comfortable ordering berries and soft fruits like peaches and mangoes this week as well since they won’t get knocked around as much with the stone fruits and hard vegetables next week.

Imperfect Foods week two:
Hard Fruits and vegetables

Week two we focus on stone fruits and vegetables. Apples, Oranges, Avocados, Broccoli, Asparagus, Squashes, the sky’s the limit here!

These are usually the mosh pit culprits that make your order smashed to bits and unusable! For this reason, we like to order them separately from everything else! Yes, we DO still get bruised apples, or ugly fruit, but hey…that’s part of the reason you signed up, right?! It’s still edible and still good!

If you need a recipe for what to do with those bruised apples, try our Instapot AppleSauce…it’s super quick, delicious and toddler approved!

IMPERFECT FOODS WEEK Three:
hard dry goods

This is our “ETC” week. Imperfect Foods often has some interesting extras, such as a rare olive oil or avocado oil. They sometimes have sparkling water or soda six packs that we wouldn’t DARE order on a produce or meat week for fear of really “effing up” our order and having everything be smashed to pieces. But if there’s something that looks interesting but hard-packaged or glass, we’ll order it this week.

We get our pasta sauces and canned “anything” this week as well!

We tend to order cheese this week as well. There’s not really a rhyme or reason behind that other than to fill up the order. Imperfect Foods typically offers a great selection of cheeses, highly recommend!

Weekly Ordering

We do have weekly staples that have done really well in durability as well. We typically have repeat orders of leafy greens (romaine lettuce, kale, etc), cherry tomatoes, 2-3 onions, mushrooms, European style butter and ground beef every week. These have all played nicely with the other products we get in on those weeks.

What we avoid ordering

EGGS. We ordered it one time as an experiment, KNOWING full well that we might have one egg out of the dozen survive. Actually, we were pleasantly surprised, we had SIX that managed to not be crack or end up smashed. However, it was such a nasty gooey mess, that we decided we’d just keep this in the traditional in-person grocery run every week.

We also avoid ordering grapes these days. The first couple of orders did alright but then they started getting smashed regardless of what week we’d order them.

We used to avoid ordering berries as stated in our review of Imperfect Foods, but we got braver about a month ago and we haven’t had any squished berry issues since using the above methods.

Summary

We truly hope this guide helps you maximize your buy each week with Imperfect Foods! As always, leave a comment below with any questions or if you want more information on how we grocery shop!

If you want to try out Imperfect Foods, use this link for $10 off your first order!

YES! I want $10 off my first Imperfect Foods order and Raising Up Rentfros is super awesome!! 😉

We also get $10 off our order when you order, so thank you so much for trusting in us to provide you with honest feedback and guidance!