With more than one billion meals served each year, the HelloFresh Group is one of the biggest direct to consumer food companies worldwide. Each of our eight food solution brands offers a unique and delicious experience, and our team is responsible for bringing those experiences closer to our customers across the world. 

Patrick Stal, Senior Vice President of Marketing, joined the HelloFresh Group in December 2023 and is now leading the marketing team across our international markets - encompassing 16 countries spanning from Spain to New Zealand -  from Berlin. He recently sat down with us to provide insights on his personal journey, his vision for AI in marketing and share why meal kit brands should move away from their discount spirals. 

Tell us about your personal journey before HelloFresh. 

In my 20 years of experience, I broadly spent a decade in consulting and the other half leading full stack in-house marketing teams at high-paced scale-up businesses like N26, TomTom and Uber.

I grew up quadrilingual and I’m half German, half Dutch. My family moved around a lot, which I think shaped me to be immensely curious about other cultures. For me, curiosity is the core essence of being a good marketer. Marketing is one of the most cognitively diverse functions, bringing together people with the most diverse disciplines, from data scientists to typography designers. Ensuring we speak the same language as a team, and work towards  unified objectives, leads to the inspirational power of marketing – and business success. 

What is the milestone you are most proud of since you joined HelloFresh? 

I’m incredibly excited about the work the teams are currently working on. I’ve only been here for  8 months and the momentum we’ve been able to generate in that time has deeply impressed me. We have incredible talent and I can’t wait to see what they will build for our customers in the years to come. 

I’m particularly excited about the back to school campaign we have just launched, which has introduced a new era for our main brand: HelloFresh. Having defined the meal kit category globally, and scaled by relentlessly prioritizing the support of households as they were changing their lifestyles throughout and beyond the global Covid crisis, we’ve maintained stable growth since then. It’s now time to write our next chapter.

The other thing I’m proud of is the cultural change we’ve started to embark on together over the past few months. When I joined, I was impressed by the team's strong commitment to data-driven decision-making. We are embracing a cultural shift that looks beyond that data to human insights and anecdotal enrichment, thereby giving us more conviction-based decision-making to make better, more customer-centric decisions, faster. In a sense, we are dialing up our company DNA values of customer centricity and speed & agility on top of the strong foundation of data drivenness.

The second part of the cultural change is a mindset change regarding our competitive lens. HelloFresh is a once-in-a-generation business and if we want to ‘change the way people eat forever,’ we’ll need to compete for a larger share of meal occasions in more households. Our diverse set of brands gives us a real edge to achieve just that.

HelloFresh’s Back to School Campaign 2024

How are we currently leveraging AI in marketing and what will the future look like?

We are using AI and Machine Learning to make our marketing more efficient, more engaging, and more personalized. One example is our AI-driven customer value prediction. By predicting future actions of our customers, we can individualize marketing for different customer groups and create personalized offers, which results in more effective marketing spend and a better ability to deliver upon individual customers’ needs.

We are also heavily investing in GenAI to make our content creation more effective. Today we are already leveraging GenAI for written content articles and CRM messaging, and we will expand this to further advertising content like images, photos and video within the next  year. This will help us grow the quantity of our output, we will be able to test more marketing material and get immediate feedback with the help of AI models. The upcoming years will be very exciting for marketers and the smart implementation of AI will be key for brands to succeed. 

How will you and your team bring our marketing to the next level?

My ambition is that we become the world’s best direct-to-consumer meal marketing team.  We’ll get there by positioning our brands at the heart of culture and continue to explain, and expand, the unique value we offer to our customers’ households. Our focus will be to enrich our customer value proposition, to find, and retain customers. 

Perhaps most importantly, we’ll have succeeded when we’ve been able to reverse the discount spiral that D2C food categories across the world have been witnessing. Food should not be on discount. It should be fresh, accessible, and incredibly rewarding to prepare and consume. Everyday. A healthier value dynamic in the category will pass more value to customers with structurally lower prices, more value to farmers and breeders at higher ingredient margins and more value to shareholders as businesses in the category continue to generate healthy long-term value for their stakeholders. 

My team is committed to ensuring our brands are differentiated, relevant to customers, built on authentic truths and playing at the very peak of their competitive capabilities.

If you want to join our mission to help us change the way people eat, forever - you can find our open Marketing positions here.