While I have definitely had my complaints with Fresh Direct’s level of service (as have many others), I have always respected the obvious care and attention that they have paid to the design and usability of their website. In fact, I often cite Fresh Direct as an example of a very usable and innovative design. Unfortunately, the “real-world” aspects of their service — i.e. the quality of their products, delivery and customer service — have been so uneven, and occasionally horrid, that I have stopped ordering from them almost completely. That may be about to change.

The site’s new One-Click Recipes function allows users to browse for recipes in a variety of categories: by author, cookbook, theme, ingredient, etc. Bear in mind that these are real published recipes in well-known cookbooks such as The New Basics and Staff Meals (two staples of my cookbook shelf), not hit-or-miss, user-submitted content. Once you locate a recipe you want to try, the site automatically creates a shopping cart that contains the right amounts of the ingredients you’ll need — including an ingenius “things you may already have” section that allows you to add stuff like Olive Oil, Salt, etc. that most cooks have in their pantries. This subtlety is, to me, really the evidence of someone thinking through the scenario carefully. The site editors have selected the items that they think you probably won’t have and they have prefilled the quantities for these. For the items you probably will have, they include the item in a separate section of the cart, with a zero quantity. Tidy.

Of course, none of this matters if, once your order arrives, the meat is spoiled and the Diet Coke has exploded all over the melted ice cream. But it is dang convenient and is a good enough reason for me to give Fresh Direct another try.

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