HelloFresh: how meal kits grew into a global food business
HelloFresh began with a simple promise: take the planning out of dinner. The harder part was everything behind that promise. A meal kit has to arrive with the right ingredients, in the right quantities, at the right time, while keeping food fresh and controlling waste.
That operational challenge shaped HelloFresh far more than its early image as a subscription start-up. Since its founding in Berlin in 2011, the business has built fulfilment centres, supplier networks, forecasting systems and a portfolio that now reaches beyond meal kits into ready-to-eat food.
By 2026, HelloFresh was no longer chasing growth at any cost. Management had shifted its attention toward customer quality, efficiency and profitability after several years in which revenue, order volumes and consumer habits changed sharply.
A simple idea created a difficult logistics business
Dominik Richter, Thomas Griesel and Jessica Nilsson founded HelloFresh in Berlin in November 2011. The first operation was small enough for the founders to source ingredients locally, assemble meal bags themselves and deliver early orders around the city.
The concept was easy for customers to understand. Subscribers received recipes and pre-portioned ingredients instead of deciding what to cook, shopping for every item and measuring everything at home. For HelloFresh, however, every box created a chain of decisions around procurement, demand forecasting, packing and delivery.
Food also behaves differently from a purely digital product. Ingredients expire, temperatures matter and over-ordering creates waste. HelloFresh therefore had to become good at physical operations as well as e-commerce if it wanted the subscription model to scale.
Data became useful because the product was perishable
As HelloFresh grew, forecasting became central to the economics of the service. The company needed to estimate how many customers would order each recipe, how much food to procure and how to allocate stock across fulfilment centres.
Customer data also helped shape the menu. Preferences, ordering behaviour and retention patterns could inform recipe selection and merchandising, while operational systems helped coordinate suppliers and production. Technology supported the model, but it never removed the need to execute well in kitchens, warehouses and delivery networks.
That combination of software and physical fulfilment explains why HelloFresh is better understood as a food business with a strong technology layer than as a conventional software company.
The 2017 listing gave HelloFresh more room to scale
HelloFresh went public on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange in November 2017. The final offer price was €10.25 per share, giving the company access to public capital after several years of rapid international expansion.
The listing came at a point when HelloFresh had already moved well beyond its Berlin roots. It had built operations across major international markets and was investing heavily in fulfilment capacity, customer acquisition and product development.
Going public also made the economics of the meal-kit model more visible. Investors could follow revenue growth, marketing costs, order volumes and profitability in detail. From that point onward, HelloFresh had to show not only that people liked meal kits, but that the model could produce durable returns at scale.
Acquisitions widened the meal-kit portfolio
HelloFresh expanded its offering through a series of directly related acquisitions. In March 2018, it agreed to acquire Green Chef, giving the group a premium meal-kit brand with a stronger focus on dietary preferences. Later that year, it acquired Chefs Plate in Canada.
Those deals let HelloFresh serve different price points and customer needs without forcing every shopper into one brand. The group also developed value-oriented offerings such as EveryPlate, which targeted customers looking for a lower-cost meal-kit option.
The portfolio strategy mattered because meal kits are not a single market. Customers differ on price, dietary needs, convenience and how much preparation they want to do themselves. HelloFresh increasingly treated those differences as opportunities for separate brands rather than one universal product.
Factor pushed HelloFresh beyond meal kits
The biggest strategic change arrived when HelloFresh moved deeper into ready-to-eat food. In 2020, the group acquired Factor75, a US business selling fully prepared meals. HelloFresh completed the transaction at the end of that year, with the acquisition valued at about €219.8 million in its 2020 reporting.
Factor changed the type of convenience HelloFresh could sell. A meal kit still asks the customer to cook. Ready-to-eat food removes most of that work and reaches people who value convenience but may not want to prepare dinner from ingredients.
HelloFresh later expanded Factor into additional markets and invested in dedicated production capacity. By 2026, the company reported meal kits and ready-to-eat meals as distinct product categories, reflecting how important the second model had become.
The pandemic accelerated growth, then changed the comparison
HelloFresh experienced exceptional demand during the pandemic as households cooked more meals at home and many consumers changed how they bought groceries. Revenue in 2020 rose sharply, and the company entered the following years with a much larger customer base and fulfilment network.
That period also created a difficult benchmark. Once restaurants reopened and shopping habits normalised, HelloFresh had to adjust to a market where order growth could no longer be taken for granted.
The challenge became increasingly visible in later results. Management responded by reducing its emphasis on pure customer volume and focusing more heavily on retention, average order value and profitability.
2025 became a year of efficiency rather than expansion
HelloFresh reported about €6.8 billion in revenue for 2025, down from €7.7 billion in 2024. At the same time, adjusted EBITDA rose to €422.8 million from €399.4 million.
The contrast captures the company’s newer strategy. HelloFresh was generating less revenue, but management was trying to improve the quality of that revenue through tighter marketing, operational efficiency and a stronger focus on customers who ordered more or stayed longer.
The meal-kit business showed the clearest margin improvement. HelloFresh reported a 13.5% adjusted EBITDA margin for the meal-kit category in 2025, up from 9.8% a year earlier. The company also said roughly 80% of the measures in its efficiency programme had been implemented by the end of the year.
The first half of 2026 showed the trade-off clearly
Revenue continued to decline during the first half of 2026. HelloFresh reported €3.225 billion in group revenue for the six months to 30 June, compared with €3.630 billion a year earlier.
Order volumes also fell. In the second quarter alone, the group completed 21.84 million orders, down 13.7% year on year. Meals delivered declined 14.5% to 183.6 million.
Average order value moved in the opposite direction. Excluding retail, it rose to €70.20 in the second quarter from €66.70 a year earlier. On a constant-currency basis, the increase was 6.5%.
That combination reflects the strategy HelloFresh had already described: serve fewer low-value transactions while trying to extract more value from stronger customer relationships. It does not guarantee future growth, but it shows how management was repositioning the business in 2026.
Profitability remained the priority
HelloFresh generated €120.6 million in adjusted EBITDA during the second quarter of 2026, compared with €158.5 million a year earlier. For the first half, adjusted EBITDA reached €144.2 million.
Management maintained its full-year 2026 constant-currency adjusted EBITDA outlook of €375 million to €425 million. It also said revenue performance was trending toward the lower end of its previously stated range, which anticipated a constant-currency decline of 3% to 6%.
Those figures make HelloFresh’s current position more nuanced than a simple growth story. The company remains a multibillion-euro food group, but its near-term challenge is to make a large delivery network more efficient while demand settles at a different level from the pandemic years.
Leadership also changed in 2026
Co-founder Thomas Griesel left the management board at the end of April 2026 after more than 14 years with HelloFresh. Dominik Richter remained Group CEO, continuing a leadership role he has held since the company started.
HelloFresh also appointed Assaf Ronen to the management board in May 2026 as chief operating officer. His responsibilities include central functions across marketing, operations, technology and customer service.
The change came as HelloFresh placed more emphasis on operational discipline. That makes the COO role particularly important because the group’s performance depends on coordinating customer acquisition with production, technology, fulfilment and service.
HelloFresh is now a food logistics business as much as a meal-kit brand
HelloFresh still sells the product that made it famous: boxes containing recipes and measured ingredients. Yet the company behind those boxes has become much broader.
It now operates multiple brands, serves meal-kit and ready-to-eat customers, manages large supplier networks and runs fulfilment infrastructure across international markets. By 2025, HelloFresh said its supplier network included more than 2,000 partners across 18 markets.
That scale changes what determines success. Attractive recipes still matter, but so do forecasting accuracy, food waste, customer retention, packing efficiency and delivery performance. A few percentage points of improvement across those systems can matter enormously when the business is processing millions of orders.
The original question has not changed
HelloFresh has spent 15 years making one everyday decision easier: what should we eat?
What changed is the machinery required to answer it. The small Berlin operation became a listed international group with meal-kit brands, ready-to-eat production and a logistics network built to handle fresh food at scale.
In 2026, the story is less about adding more customers at any cost and more about making that machinery work better. HelloFresh’s next phase depends on whether it can keep customers engaged, improve efficiency and protect margins while order volumes remain under pressure.
That is a very different challenge from the one the founders faced in 2011. The basic promise, however, is still recognisable: remove some of the effort between deciding what to eat and putting dinner on the table.
