Hello Fresh: Hundreds Of Millions Of Meals And Just As Many Boxes In the third quarter of 2020 alone, HelloFresh delivered more than 162 million meals to over five million active cus- tomers and the company is continuously working on im- proving its product to win over even more customers. One of the many things on its agenda for continuous improve- ment are its boxes and packaging materials. Thomas Regenhardt, Head of Packaging at Hello Fresh, explained how his team deals with the different challeng- es around packaging, the company’s achievements and its plans for the future. “HelloFresh does not operate a standard e-commerce system in which packaging is used exclusively to bring a product safely to customers,” said Regenhardt. “Our busi- ness model is very difficult to duplicate. We have to select
packaging under completely different conditions and as- pects than other companies. Sometimes we even have to develop it ourselves. Our philosophy is to use packaging as sustainably, efficiently and consciously as possible. We
focus on a mix of consistent quality, envi- ronmental friendliness and functionality. Especially the latter is a continuous devel- opment process because we need to trans- port fresh ingredients. From tomatoes, cu- cumbers, rice and pasta to various types of meat, both thermal and sensory properties must be taken into account to provide our customers with the best possible freshness for their HelloFresh recipes.” According to Regenhardt, here are three basic challenges in packaging develop- ment: Dynamics, Temperature and Insula- tion. Dynamics: “At HelloFresh we offer our customers different recipes and add-ons each week, which means that there will al- ways be different requirements concerning packaging. In order to approach this in a data-driven way, we are currently develop- ing our packaging configurator 2.0, which in the future will predict our packaging con- sumption completely autonomously and dy- namically.The goal is to optimize the config- urator in a way that will enable us to predict requirements for packaging, even as our product portfolio grows. Temperature: “One of the most import- ant requirements for food safety and qual- ity is the thermal validation of our packag- ing. On average, our boxes are in transit for about 24 hours. During this time, the ingredients are exposed to many different environments, which might be refrigerated, non-refrigerated, cold or hot. It’s a complex ecosystem where internal and external tem- peratures interact, and we have to ensure that the mandated core temperature for
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January 4, 2021
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