Misfits Market Review: Discount Grocery Delivery With More Than Ugly Produce – CNET

Misfits Market is a weekly, direct-to-consumer online grocery service that delivers lower cost, high-quality produce, pantry staples, dairy products, meats/proteins and other assorted grocery items. Its inventory is sourced from farmers and food manufacturers directly in order to rescue items that would otherwise be destined for waste for a variety of reasons (more on that below) to pass on significant savings to the consumer and to provide access to higher quality products for food-insecure households in the US. Misfits Market also recently acquired Imperfect Foods, a similarly minded grocery delivery platform, in order to expand its reach and deliver a more sustainable grocery experience.

How does Misfits Market work?

Choosing a plan: Flex or subscription

Whether you opt-in for the flex plan or the grocery subscription, each week you have a three-day shopping window in which to organize your shopping cart, either by adding items if you’re a flex customer or by adjusting items in the pre-populated subscription cart. At the end of the three-day shopping window, you’re automatically charged for what’s in the cart. Orders are charged and shipped so long as there is at least $15 worth of groceries in your cart.

Shipping and delivery

Shipments are available only on certain days of the week, depending on your location, in order to reduce the carbon footprint, a move I admire. Your shopping window occurs about three to five days prior to your delivery date.

Items are delivered on your designated day with eco-conscious packaging, as well as a service that picks up and reuses or recycles certain types of packaging materials.

Misshapen produce and out-of-date packaging

Indeed, all of these issues seem superficial when given the quality of the products and especially the freshness of produce, which arrives from the source farm to you more quickly than it would given traditional grocery distribution channels. My produce was exactly as advertised, with some discoloration in citrus fruits and a few avocados on the small side, but all was still of excellent quality.

Grocery shopping on Misfits Market is intuitive and fun

For grocery subscription members, each week your cart is already populated with items that are seasonally available or have historical popularity, plus items that you typically purchase from week to week. The standard subscription box will typically contain between $55 and $65 worth of groceries, but you’re welcome to adjust amounts of each item, or the items themselves, in order to assemble a box that works best for your meal plans. Or you can simply leave it be if you’re the kind of shopper who enjoys the seasonal, almost community supported agriculture approach to using up whatever is delivered. Flex members are simply assembling an order from scratch each week.

Finding specific products is easy, either by browsing typical grocery categories or by searching for those specific products. The relatively limited inventory means that even just browsing through each category isn’t all that time-consuming. Because the inventory isn’t expansive, however, (more on that below,) it’s sometimes possible to come up empty-handed for a particular product.

Misfits Market shopping window explained

One of Misfit Market’s biggest selling points for me is that there’s no subscription cost for either program and the shipping cost is surprisingly low, especially given the wide variety of fresh, refrigerated, frozen and shelf-stable products they deliver in a single shipment. Shipping is also free for either the flex or subscription program with a $60 purchase — a very reasonable minimum even if you’re shopping for a small household. If you’re someone who can stay on top of managing your cart from week to week, there’s basically no financial downside in joining.

Misfits Market doesn’t have a low-cost guarantee like Thrive Market but claims to offer groceries with a discount of up to 40% of conventional retailers. The prices are certainly competitive, and a quick comparison via Instacart of products available in my region — Queens, NYC — showed that all of Misfit Market’s groceries were either the same or less than what I’d get from a local store.

You also receive perks by utilizing the service: one point for every dollar spent in the flex program, or two points for every dollar spent in the subscription plan, which are redeemable for freebies and gifts within the platform.