This was my order; Panforte, Organic, Daylesford (150g) £9.75 This is 10 cm The size of a biscuit. lovely taste 1Vegan Mincemeat & Apple Tart, Organic, Famous Hedgehog Bakery (650g) £14.95 19cm 1 Nut Roast, Gluten Free, Organic, Clive's (280g) £5.25 This is just under 10cm, it says for 2 so just under 5cm each. 1 Winter Vegetable Wellington with Cranberries, Organic, Lodge Farm Kitchen (500g) £14.00 16 cm by 2.07cm. I also click for the 2 free hummus that was on offer but did not receive them.

Placed a reasonably substantial order and waited. All items ordered were 'one time' delivery only and not a repeat order. Delivery duly arrived but missing some items. My outstanding items were scheduled to come the following week. However, the remaining items did not come up to their minimum spend. The website said 'put something else in your basket'. I didn't really want anything else but complied to get the remaining part of my order delivered. The final insult came when they charged me again for the second delivery. On both occasions the food was left on the ground outside an unused door. No knock or ring to announce the delivery. We found it by accident later in the day. Thankfully our local farm shop knocks them into a cocked hat with fresh local produce so we'll be getting our supplies there in future.

I was persuaded to sign up with them by one man knocking on my door. He explained that if I didn't want one item on the box I could exchange it for another one. I tried to do so for my first box, only to find out that I can only exchange it for a very small selection, not for what I needed. I decided to postpone my box as I really needed different stuff for this weekend. The new day I received a phone call from a woman asking why I had nothing on my basket and I explained. She said we could go through it over the phone, but since I wasn't home I just didn't have time or my grocery list. She added that because there is a weight limit they limit what you can order to which I replied that I didn't want to shop in a place where I am limited to what they think I need. She got angry and hung up.

I was looking forward to buying some veg mid week from this place. I buy six grade one broccoli's from the orange supermarket for 50p each, that's £3 a week. Abel and Cole charge £2.05 for one, excluding delivery, they're having a laugh, I don't care if it's organic, my broccoli's never go off and taste perfect. people who buy from this place must be daft or so rich, they don't care.

Service outstanding! Logistics on the other hand are a chaos. Wrong itens, bread left out in the rain....

The flyer dropped through my door and I toyed with the idea, but cast it aside into the contents of my bin, discarding it like so my other opportunistic leaflets. Then over a course of several months another came, then another, and a bell of consideration rang through my mind. We endeavour to by organic, which is a real shame since all food should really be organic and not as it appears at this present time. So here I am presented with this opportunity to get all my organic whims played to with the contents of an aspiring brown box. I go online, fill in the details, select my box and ahhhaha...it is complete, all there is now, is the waiting. Two days past and I got up expectantly at 6am and found myself pleasantly surprised by the neat consigned parcels outside my house. Rushing to the kitchen I ushered my wife in for this most grand of openings; and that is where my issue is. We got a box sufficient to feed a family of five...but I beg to differ...I, have a family of five, I cook each day, and I ensure that my wife who works gets a slap up meal each night full of vegetables and goodness,,and this is not even considering my children. The onions were small and some less then firm and to be fair would've been able to muster enough effort to deal with three meals, and the potatoes would've done for four. The amount of fruit was nowhere near sufficient for a family of five and the ticking of 'I don't like asparagus' box did little to quell the ability to resist putting in my box. The bread was boarder line ok, and I do have to say that the milk was brilliant. So here I am, with my inadequate box of fruit and veg, a box that was supposed to remove my weekly quest for sourcing organic food,and I am left with the prospect of going to supermarket tomorrow to obtain the foods sufficient to feed my brood for the next seven days..I will not be purchasing from them again, I have no intention of throwing more money at it, making excuses for others..how many times does one have to get hit with a hammer to understand it hurts..once for me. To make matters a little worse, I'm still awaiting a response to an email sent about my despondence...interestingly, they did send me an email about how I have altered my selections for next week and that I have nothing yet in my basket. All I have to add is that you have been weighed, measured, and found wanting...

I have used A&C for about a year and find that sometimes I am delighted with my box and other items - with no complaints at all - The produce is fresh, healthy and the quantities as expected. Other times I find for example that the purple sprouting broccoli is already in full flower and there is very little of it, also fruit is often bruised. They seem to struggle with their bakers availability of produce too. Being able to adapt your box by editing likes and dislikes is a good device, however, as a company they appear to have an obsession with anything from the squash family and as they are often called weird and wonderful names it can be challenging to find them all in the edit list - so despite hating them I find that A&C will sneak one in to the box whatever I say! You have to watch out for creatures living in the broccoli too and I do wonder if their quality control at the packing stage sometimes let's them down. Overall I will continue to use them as their delivery is very reliable - even on bank holidays, their website is easily navigated, the recipes are excellent and their customer care over the phone is good. When they get it right they are excellent - they just need to aim for consistency of quality and put further checks in at packing stage. They could perhaps consider being proactive in checking their customer satisfaction by e mail a couple of times a year. I would recommend them to friends - it's a good initiative and on balance I am happy.

I wanted to support small business rather than supermarkets so I tried Abel and Cole for a while but their products weren't fresh and it wasn't one off disappointment. In the end I had to stop buying from them because they kept sending me moldy veg, fruits and even meat weren't fresh. Idea was good though.

Initially good , but rotten food became a regular event . very disappointed

I have been receiving the medium veg box from Abel and Cole for several weeks now. I have had organic veg boxes in the past and given them up as the veg all too often was good for nothing other than compost, so I wasn't really expecting great things. How wrong could I be? The quality of the veg is absolutely first class. The shape of the veg is not the perfect, uniform shape that you get in the supermarkets. Good! Veg does not all grow to a uniform size and shape. But,it is the flavour and quality that really does it for me. The peppers are the biggest, juiciest peppers I have ever eaten. The squash are beautiful. The onions are juicy. The clementines (which I ordered as an extra) are like nothing I have ever tasted, taking me right back to my childhood - only better. The medium veg box is designed for 2-3 people, I am vegetarian and I can say that with the exception of onions they send enough veg to last me easily for the week (cooking for two), with several spare 'ready meals' for the freezer. The prices are comparable with the supermarkets (where you can actually get the organic variety in the supermarket. Try getting organic celeriac or chard!). Every so often they include a little something for free - a big fat garlic bulb or a juicy lemon and each week there is a recipe card with ideas for some of the veg in your box. Each week's box contains the staple onions and potatoes and carrots (unless you don't want them). Which brings me to one of the best things about Abel and Cole veg boxes, unlike their main rival, you can opt for things that you don't like, or just don't want on that particular week, to be excluded from your box. No more will you have to eat sprouts for a week if you hate them! And, better still they will try to replace the things you don't like with things that you do like. For example, this week was a bad week for me, chinese leaves, red cabbage and lettuce in the box, but with Abel and Cole that is okay, they didn't send them. They sent me butternut squash,celery and celeriac instead. So,no waste. Brilliant! You can alter your likes and dislikes as often as you wish (as long as you do so before the order deadline,depending on your delivery area). They also do a whole range of other organic groceries of very high quality. Oh! I can't conclude without some praise for the packaging. Hooray! A company that truly makes an effort to look after the environment, the cardboard boxes that your veg and groceries come in are easily folded flat for reuse (and indeed they collect my old ones each week and my veg is often delivered in previously used boxes so they do,do what they say!). They also have a great cardboard box lined with wool for keeping your dairy produce cold - reusable of course. There is hardly any plastic packaging. A high proportion of what they sell is produced here in the UK and nothing is transported by air. There is lots of detail on the web site about their producers, so if you would like to see a photo of the man who grows your spuds, you can! And to top it all off the staff are friendly and helpful. I would recommend Abel and Cole to anyone. Absolutely brilliant.

I have the same experience as Eleanor. After being a faithful customer for a few years, earlier this year I started finding the quality had degraded: yoghurts didn't last, at least one fruit or vegetable on the box was rotting and indelible. After I stopped using their service, they started hassling me with phone calls. The last straw was when I recently started receiving random marketing rubbish from companies. After numerous phone calls and emails chasing down various companies over a period of 2 months, I found out that Abel & Cole had decided to sell my contact details to a marketing company Transactis, who sold it to Experian and who sold it on to random companies. This is despite: (a) I never agreed to allow my contact details to be passed on (I had opted out on my preferences); and (b) in any case their privacy policy states they would only pass it onto "carefully selected 3rd parties whose products or services you might be interested in". How does selling to random marketing companies fulfil this? Not withstanding the fact that I never agreed to this, they are in breach of their own privacy policies. The worst of it is that they ignored my emails until I posted on their Facebook account and I'm yet to receive a satisfactory response from them. I cannot believe their audacity. Don't sign up with them unless you want shoddy produce and your details to be sold to random companies.

We were really looking forward to our first delivery but unfortunately have been greatly disappointed. We usually shop at Waitrose and Ocado and prefer organic and free range food. The vegetables in our Abel & Cole box were ok except for the kiwi fruit which was over ripe and the carrots were starting to decay.
The cake, bread and scones were the biggest disappointment as they were hard - we expected at the premium cost we paid that they would be fresh but that was not the case! The sausages, despite having a use by date in a couple of days had a strange odour so we threw them away!
I fully support the values and ideals behind Abel and Cole but feel that the quality and freshness of the goods supplied needs to be greatly improved. I will not be making another purchase.