With over 4,000 employees now and 8 million meals delivered each month, Blue Apron is by most accounts a runaway success story in the fledgling $5 billion meal-kit delivery industry. But a new investigative exposé from BuzzFeed reveals that all has not been so well at the company's Richmond, California-based fulfillment center, where a largely unskilled labor pool in a crime-ridden city that's been long depressed economically has proven a major challenge for rapidly growing company. Growing pains in the last couple of years — which saw the warehouse grow from 50 employees to over 1,000 — have included death threats and assaults among its employees, bomb threats, and major safety violations and fines paid to Cal OSHA.

First of all, the place is freezing cold, with the whole warehouse kept at a refrigerator temperature below 40 degrees. Blue Apron provides employees, who do everything from pack garlic and herbs into little baggies to filling small jars of honey and soy sauce, with thermals, jackets, neck warmers, and gloves, but some employees interviewed for the piece said their fingers would still go numb while working. Also, everything was done at a frantic pace as the company struggled to keep up with customer demand skyrocketing between 2014 and 2015. One of 14 former employees interviewed, a former team lead, described it like this for BuzzFeed: "I would get sent to Whole Foods and buy things if we really needed an ingredient and we didn’t have it in the building... One day in pack-out could be worse than an entire Black Friday at Best Buy, as far as stress goes."

Sara Custer, a former West Coast operations manager, said the facility was packing about 6,500 boxes when she interviewed in early 2014, and 9,000 by the time she started three weeks later. Fast forward to last August, when she left, and they were shipping 34,000 boxes each week — with two to three meals per box, and 10 to 15 ingredients per meal, you can see how chaotic that would be. "It was crazy," says Custer. "You felt like you were running all the time. Your hair’s on fire and you can’t keep up."

2015 alone saw a forklift accident that cost the company a $13,000 fine from CalOSHA, as well as nine other safety violations and proposed penalties that totaled $11,695, which the company appealed — and some violations were downgraded.

With all that growth, and the need to hire minimum wage warehouse workers at a boom pace not seen in Richmond since World War II, some bad apples in the work force were also fairly inevitable.

Per BuzzFeed:

In the 38 months since Blue Apron’s facility opened, the Richmond Police Department has received calls from there twice because of weapons, three times for bomb threats, and seven times because of assault. Police captains have met twice with Blue Apron to discuss the frequency of calls to the police. At least four arrests have been made due to violence on the premises, or threats of it. Employees have reported being punched in the face, choked, groped, pushed, pulled, and even bitten by each other on the job, according to police reports. Employees recalled bomb scares, brandished kitchen knives, and talk of guns.

Reporter Caroline O'Donovan spoke to CNBC about her investigation, and said that temp employees who had to be hired in a hurry to meet fulfillment demand posed some of the problems.

The company declined to go on the record about any of the incidents, simply giving the boilerplate response that it remains committed to "creating the best possible workplace experience for all of our employees." And "Blue Apron has learned from the operational challenges during its early days in Richmond, is proud of the culture, processes, and workplace that exist there today, as well as throughout the country."

They also shifted some blame to the vetting processes of staffing agencies they used in the past, saying, they "experienced challenges with several temporary staffing agencies whose workers did not meet our performance standards and that sometimes provided workers who did not always abide by our policies and procedures or share our values."

Blue Apron also has fulfillment facilities in Jersey City, New Jersey and Arlington, Texas, and a corporate headquarters in New York City. As Fortune reported in June, the four-year-old company is likely going public in the next year.

Previously: The 6 Best Meal/Food Delivery Services In S.F.

Disclosure: Blue Apron has in the past been a sponsor and advertiser for our parent company Gothamist.