Harry & David Tower of Treats Review

Product Selection:

Shopping at Harry & David requires quite a bit of self-restraint. From fresh summer fruit and chocolate covered treats to gourmet charcuterie and cheese assortments, there is an extensive array of tempting foods to choose from as you scroll through their mouthwatering pages. They also have a wide range of price points to fit most gift budgets. You can keep it simple with tasty snack trays that start at under $20, or go big with an entire gourmet dinner spread for about $200. No matter what you choose, your recipient is sure to be delighted with what arrives.

Harry & David makes it easy to find the perfect gift with intuitive shopping tabs across the top of their pages. Once you choose a category of food or type of occasion, you can further refine your choices by using the filters along the left side of the page to narrow down your results by price, shipping options, type of gift and more.

We checked out their best sellers, and ultimately decided to order the Signature Tower of Treats^® that is currently retailing for only $44.95. It includes a nice variety of sweet and salty with pears, truffles, mixed nuts, chocolate covered cherries and gourmet caramel and chocolate popcorn. Standard shipping was $9.95 and varies based on the cost of your order, but be sure to check out TheCoupon.co for free shipping coupons and other discounts before you checkout.

Overall the checkout process was easy to navigate. They include a place to enter a custom message to your recipient, and you can select the arrival date of your gift, as well. You also have the option of creating an account as you checkout so they will save your address and order information for future purchases, and even remind you of important dates (like your anniversary or mother's birthday) so you never forget to send a timely and delicious gift.

Delivery & Product:

Standard delivery only takes 3 days, so unless you are in a big hurry (or waited until the last minute to find a gift for someone…we've all been there!), you won't have to wait too long for your delectable gourmet gift to arrive. True to their word, our Harry & David gift tower arrived 3 days after we placed our order. It came in a good sized delivery box, and the entire tower was encased in a reflective, padded bag to help regulate the temperature because it arrived on a rather hot July day. There were also three ice packs inside of the bag to keep things cool, but all three were completely melted and room temperature. However, an unexpected bonus is that they are all reusable, so they will definitely come in handy next time we pack up a cooler or picnic!

Once all of the packaging was removed, we got our first look at the entire Tower of Treats in all of its glory. We were impressed with the lovely gift wrapping and the quality of the contents as we unboxed the treats one by one. It's definitely a gift that would make a positive impression upon the lucky recipient (which in this case was us…yippee!).

Upon further inspection, we saw that the chocolate truffles had fallen victim to the hot temperatures and did not make it to their final destination unscathed (we were in the middle of a triple-digit heat wave when the package arrived). The cherry and dark chocolate truffles were a total loss – or at the very least would need to be scraped up with a spoon. The other truffles had also been compromised, but after we left them in the refrigerator for an hour or so they seemed to hold up okay.

Everything else seemed to be in good shape despite the heat. It's hard to get too excited about a bag of mixed nuts, but it was a nice balance to the sweeter treats in this food tower. The milk chocolate covered cherries had a nice flavor, but were a bit on the sweet side (which isn't necessarily a bad thing, just not our favorite). Our top picks wound up being the delicious Royal Verano pears and the milk chocolate Moose Munch^® gourmet popcorn. The pears took a few days to ripen, but they were definitely worth the wait.

We called customer service to let them know about the unfortunate truffle situation, and we were very impressed with the helpful and courteous representative that took care of us. She apologized for the truffles not arriving in good condition and immediately offered to send complementary replacement truffles via 2-day shipping. She even offered to give us a discount on another order of their signature Royal Verano pears for the inconvenience of us having to call customer service, but since we were still enjoying the first round, we just accepted the replacement truffles.

All-in-all we were highly impressed with the reasonable price of the product, speed of shipping, helpfulness of customer service and overall presentation of the gift we ordered from Harry & David. Compared to other gourmet gift companies we've tried, Harry & David definitely delivered on both quality and value.