(EXPIRED) Home Chef $50 Via Portals, But Be Quick If Using Amex Platinum Credits

The Swagbucks and Upromise shopping portals are both offering $50 cashback when placing your first Home Chef order through them. This can stack nicely with the Amex Platinum credits for Home Chef, but there’s a key thing you’ll need to do before those credits expire at the end of today (June 30).

The Deal

• Earn $50 cashback when signing up for Home Chef via Swagbucks or Upromise.
• Direct link to offer – Swagbucks
• Direct link to offer – Upromise

Key Terms

• Expiry date unknown.
• Cash Back will appear as pending for 32 days.

Quick Thoughts

At the start of this year, Amex Platinum cardholders who’d had the card since November 1, 2020 were offered a ton of valuable Amex Offers. The two most noteworthy ones were 2x $50 credits for both Home Depot and BestBuy.com, but another valuable offer was for Home Chef.

Amex offered 3x $50 statement credits, although the Home Chef offer differed slightly from the Home Depot and BestBuy.com offers. With those two other offers you could spend $100 in a single transaction to trigger both $50 credits, whereas with Home Chef you had to spend $50 in three separate transactions in order to earn the three $50 statement credits.

If you didn’t use those Home Chef credits yet, it’s hopefully not too late to get value from them, although there are limitations on how to do that. The safest option will be to buy $50 Home Chef gift cards in three separate transactions – that’s what I did last month and received three $50 statement credits a couple of days later because Home Chef processes payment for those gift cards themselves rather than using a third party processor like CashStar, Buyatab, etc. There is a risk that the transactions will post as July 1 and so not be eligible for the statement credit, but I ordered all three gift cards on May 24 and all three posted as May 24 transactions, so hopefully that won’t be an issue.

We’re currently staying in the same place for just over a month (so that we don’t have to pay hotel taxes) and have a kitchen (it’s an Element, one of Marriott’s extended stay brands), so with Swagbucks offering $50 cashback I finally got around to placing our first Home Chef order and redeemed our gift cards. If I’m remembering the process correctly from when I placed the order last week, the earliest delivery date was a few days ahead of time and I don’t think payment is taken until the box is sent (it’s due to arrive today). If that’s the case, placing your first order today and paying with your Amex Platinum card means they won’t take payment until after the Amex Offer has expired which is why buying gift cards today would be the safer option.

When placing that first order, Home Chef applied some kind of discount for our first few orders; I think it gave a discount on meals as well as free shipping, but I might not be remembering that correctly. That would’ve been an even greater stack, but there was a problem. Using that automatically-applied promo code meant that it didn’t seem to be possible to redeem a gift card in the same transaction – it was one or the other. However, this was my first time ordering from Home Chef, so there might be some workarounds that I’m not aware of.

If you’re likely to continue ordering from Home Chef beyond your first few boxes, it could be best to make use of the automatically-applied promo code for savings on those first few boxes, then redeem your gift cards for subsequent orders. That way you can take advantage of the discounts from Home Chef as well as the $150 of free gift cards from the Amex Offer.

Although you can pause Home Chef deliveries, we’re traveling overseas for the month of August and I’ve no clue if we’ll be staying anywhere with a kitchen when we get back. It therefore didn’t make sense for our particular situation to hold off on redeeming our gift cards for now and only use the Home Chef discounts. As a result, I removed the promotion that Home Chef applied and redeemed our gift cards instead so that our first three orders would be free.

And it is indeed free food. The plan we subscribed to sends us two meals per week for two people. Each meal is $8.99 per person, so that’s $35.96. $13.99 shipping is charged on top of that for a total of $49.95 which means we’re nearly maxing out a $50 gift card for each order, thereby getting three free weeks for our plan.

The $50 from Swagbucks – or Upromise if you use their portal instead – is therefore gravy (pun somewhat intended). That could pay for a fourth week of our plan, but we’ll likely take that $50 profit and cancel Home Chef after we’ve received our three weeks of food. The good news is that Swagbucks tracked our first order, so there doesn’t seem to be a tracking issue when paying for your first order with gift cards.

To play safe, it might be best to order the Home Chef gift cards in incognito mode so that when you do eventually come to place your first order, there aren’t any Home Chef cookies on your computer.

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