Kroger, This Is Unacceptable: Our Disgusting Hot Deli Fried Chicken
Sometimes you just don’t feel like cooking. That was us when we stopped at Kroger and decided to give their hot deli food a try. We figured fried chicken, mashed potatoes, macaroni and cheese, and a dinner roll would make for a quick and easy dinner. Unfortunately, we should have gone somewhere else.
The fried chicken was absolutely terrible. It was dry, extremely chewy, and tasted like it had been sitting around far too long. Take a look at the photo. The chicken certainly didn’t look fresh, but we gave Kroger the benefit of the doubt and hoped it would taste better than it looked. It did not. There is no good reason for a major grocery chain like Kroger to be selling fried chicken in this condition. If prepared food has been sitting under a heat lamp long enough to become dry, tough, and unpleasant to eat, throw it away and make another batch. Don’t expect a paying customer to become the disposal system for food that should have been removed from sale. The mashed potatoes were okay, and the macaroni and cheese was okay. Nothing spectacular, but at least they were edible. Incredibly, the best thing on the entire plate was the dinner roll. When the highlight of a fried chicken dinner is a basic roll, something has gone seriously wrong.
Then there is Kroger’s response...or rather, the lack of one. We called attention to the unacceptable chicken on social media, and Kroger didn’t even bother responding to us. There was no apology, no explanation, and not even a basic acknowledgment of our complaint. That only made an already disappointing experience worse. Companies love social media when they’re advertising sales, promoting products, and telling customers how wonderful they are. But social media also gives customers a public place to hold companies accountable when the products they receive don’t live up to reasonable expectations. Ignoring criticism doesn’t make the criticism disappear, and ignoring a customer who brings a legitimate quality concern to your attention certainly doesn’t demonstrate great customer service.
Where was the quality control here? Someone should be checking the hot deli throughout the day and deciding when chicken has been sitting too long to continue selling. Employees should be empowered to throw old food away instead of continuing to offer it to unsuspecting customers. If they are empowered, then they need to follow-up with their employees. Freshness and quality should be basic expectations when a grocery store chooses to operate a hot food department. If you cannot offer fresh food, close it down. This isn’t some tiny operation struggling to manage a deli counter. This is Kroger, one of the largest grocery retailers in America. A company of that size should have standards and procedures designed to prevent food of this quality from ending up on a customer’s dinner table.
At Road Tour, we spend our money at businesses across America, and when something is good, we’ll say it’s good. When something is terrible, we’ll say that too. This meal was terrible (the fried chicken ruined it), and Kroger’s failure to even acknowledge our complaint certainly didn’t help its case.
Based on this experience, Road Tour does not recommend Kroger for a hot deli meal. Save your money and find somewhere that takes greater pride in the prepared food it serves. Kroger can and should do much better, because customers paying for a hot meal deserve something better than dry, chewy chicken and silence when they complain.
