Town & Country Foods?

T.,

Don't know anything about them, but looked up the website, and it sounds interesting....let me know if you decide to do it. I would love to hear what you think about the pitch/product/cost etc...

Hi T.,

We order from them and they are great! Of course someone has to come over to do their presentation which is an hour, but it's educational and we were sold on it. So now we have this huge freezer in our garage totallly stocked with all kinds of meats, veggies and other food. They have AWESOME mac & cheese.....but don't buy the pizzas, they aren't so great and neither is the cheesecake. But we really just wanted to do this for the meat and it's worth it in my opinion. Email me if you have any other questions, but I say go for it, it's worth the investment.

T.

We sat through the presentation as well. I found their meat to be incredibly expensive per pound! I wanted to focus more on chicken, turkey and pork because thats what we eat more (with an occasional steak.

The price per pound is basically the same if you get 20 lbs of chicken or 20 pounds of steak. That made it not worth it for us.

We do use Omaha for the occasional steak.

Good luck with your decision!

C.

Be prepared for a hard hard sell. They offer you all this "free" meat if you buy their really expensive freezers.

I had them come do their pitch but didn't buy. The BBB lie ticked me off to start with . . . my tree trimmer, hvac company, security service, etc are all members but don't require my husband to be home. Clearly there was some truth stretching going on.

On the food. . . . overpriced . . . but I would have paid if the sales person, who seemed to be willing to say anything to get a sale, could answer my questions regarding the traceability of the beef. I do not feed my children beef because of concerns about mad cow disease. I was looking for beef which was certified raised on organic feed and born and raised on an organic ranch or traceable from another organic ranch.

It was pretty clear they were claiming their beef was better for you with out real sound data behind it. They use a lot of newpaper articles in the pitch but they don't even have the whole article so you can't even read it to see if what they are telling you is in the article. At one point the sales guy quoted a well know publication, pointed to a related article title from that publication and proceeded to make some points. I found them hard to believe and said, "show me where it says that in this article." He couldn't.

At the end of the day I'm only willing to pay a premium for better safety/quality. When I question the integrity of the company I have to wonder if I will get it.

I will say the samples tasted great (my husband and I do eat beef) and the vacuum packing process worked great for quick dethawing.

We have used them for about 8 months. The main benefit we've experienced is the convenience of it. With 2 kids, a trip to the grocery store can be a nightmare. Since the freezer is stocked with meat, I can get in and out with our other groceries pretty quickly and I don't have to scour ads and run around town looking for the best deals on meat.
I will say though that we ran out of food in the freezer sooner than we thought. Also, we are going to choose our food a little better with our next 6-month supply. Their standard package comes with a lot of meats that we don't usually purchase (different cuts of steak and roasts). We traded out some things for our initial order, but I will be making a lot more modifications for our next order. We were not impressed with their cuts of pork (neither was a friend who signed up after us), so we will exchange those for boneless skinless chicken breasts.
I was actually getting a better deal on meats by shopping the ads every week. However, the Town & Country meats are higher quality. The ground beef is all muscle meat, and all the meat in any particular package comes from one cow (as opposed to the stuff you get from the grocery store which may come from 30 different cows, and include "parts" besides muscle). The chicken has no added hormones and no added solutions (stuff at the store usually has a sodium/broth solution added for color, etc.). It is also trimmed really well, which may justify the cost. When I buy a package of breasts at the store, it may cost $1.99/pound on sale, but I may trim off a quarter pound of junk before cooking it. It seems to even out the cost when you consider that. I also like the way their meats are packaged -- individually shrink wrapped and flash frozen. You can cut apart exactly the number of servings you need, rather than having to defrost several pounds for one small family meal.
All in all, if you are on a very tight budget, it will likely cost more than you're used to. But, if you're within the "normal" spending range, which is what the representative will show you while he's there, you shouldn't notice much difference in your food bill, but you will notice that you're spending less time at the grocery store regardless.

I had scheduled for tham to come to the house. And someone called to remind me of the apt. He was so rude, and pretty much questioned me cause we rent and not own our house?? I canceled cause I was offended. I felt like I was being looked down upon cause we rent!! Needless to say it was not a pleasant experience. I think if you own they would be kissin butt!!! Just my experience!! Good Luck!

I think they wanted your husband there so that you couldn't say "i'll have to talk to my husband about it". there is a furniture place that won't let you come alone, you have to bring your spouse.

Hi T.,
We have used Town and Country for over a year now and we love them. The meats are great and we have modified the menues to what we use and are very satisfied with what we get. We also had an incident where one of our kids left the freezer door cracked after getting something out of it and all of our food went bad. It was not a complete freezer full...but Town and Country replaced it all at no cost to us. I think that if something like this happenes then they will do this once but...they have been just great to us and we all love the food. And on top of that it is good for us and not full of hormones and water and junk. Good luck....it is worth a try!

I haven't dealt with them before, but most likely they want you both to be there because it is a high pressure sales pitch and they don't want you to have the "excuse" of "i need to talk to my husband and I will get back to you". They use the "free meat" pitch to get an appt with you. They are in business to make money, so I am sure they are going to try to get you to buy something when they get there.

I don't know this as fact, but this would be my guess. anyone else have experience with this? Let me know if I am way off base.

T.,

We have been using Town and Country for about 7 or 8 months. There are things we like and things we don't. Certainly, it is a great way to save money. And the meat seems to be very good quality. I don't, however, really like their business model - things like what you experienced. It seems a little unprofessional. The sales pitch can be misleading on certain items. Like it isn't real clear that the freezer you buy from them to store all the meat (which I'm sure they make all their money on the sale of the freezer) is financed at a pretty high rate (unlike the meat) so you really want to have the cash to pay that off within the first few months. And they also tell you that you can return any unwanted meat for an exchange at anytime. After the fact, however, you realize that you can only do that when you re-order more meat. So, you have to wait a bit for that to happen.

We are actually only just about to order our second round of meat, so I'll be interested to see if they will take all of the unwanted stuff in exchange without too much hassle.

If you do the program (and like I said, it is good quality meat and a is a significant savings), I would recommend only ordering the stuff you use most. For us, that is chicken breasts, ground meat, hamburger patties, whole chickens, and some roasts. We made the mistake of ordering too much variety thinking we would find recipes to try all of it. That didn't up being realistic for us.

And by the way, their sales pitch is annoyingly long (3 hrs?), so make sure you have the time.

Hope that helps.