Stories
Aug 26
What’s a food solutions group?
What started with the plan to change the way people eat forever has grown into a successful global company, on track to deliver 900m meals to its consumers this year. Since its initial launch, a huge data-driven technology platform has been developed across our entire value chain. By now, HelloFresh provides households around the world with a broad range of products and services that have recently expanded beyond the initial idea of just meal-kits.
Our vision is to become the world’s leading food solutions group. While we’ve been focusing on providing our customers with delicious solutions for dinner, we believe that there is an even bigger market to go after. Moving forward we want to capture and provide for as many meal occasions as possible. We see a big opportunity to serve them even better by expanding our suite of products to include solutions for breakfast, lunch and in-between snacks.
Taking ownership over the entire value chain - from creating and manufacturing delicious products to offering them to our customers on our own tech platform, to sending them to our customers with our own logistics fleet. We see ourselves as a company that uses its superior understanding of consumer’s tastes and preferences to increase value for them. Not only for home-cooked dinners but also beyond.
Given that we announced our ambition levels for the next couple of years publicly during last year's Capital Markets Day, it’s important to look at it in the context of our overall growth strategy. It consists of three main growth levers, which together provide the opportunity to build a company that has an even bigger positive impact on people’s lives all around the world:
1. Growing the core business and increasing the penetration in all existing markets
Our meal-kits enable everyone to enjoy fresh, delicious and healthy meals without the associated hassle of having to find a recipe and shop for the necessary ingredients. By continuously expanding the menu, we have been able to serve a broader range of tastes, lifestyle and dietary preferences. And we believe there is still significant room for growth in the meal-kit category across both of our operating segments (USA and International). In order to increase the penetration of our Total Addressable Market (TAM), we can either grow in line with or faster than the overall meal-kit market. According to Statista analyses the market had a size of about 10.26 billion U.S. Dollars in 2020 and is expected to be about 18.65 billion U.S. Dollars in 2025. By offering a better service and product range at very competitive price points compared to our direct and indirect competitors, we will improve the value proposition for our (potential) customers and manage to gradually grab a higher share of the developing meal kit market.
2. Expanding our addressable market: Launching new geographies, internationalising our existing brand portfolio and expanding our offering by acquiring further companies
There are attractive opportunities to selectively expand geographically: Recently in July we expanded to Norway and earlier this year we launched the US-only brand Green Chef in the UK. We have committed to launching 1-2 new geographies per year and have a strong pipeline ahead of us. With the acquisition of ready-to-eat company Factor in the US and the planned acquisition of Youfoodz in Australia we are diversifying our offer and reaching even more, previously untapped customer segments around the world.
3. Expanding the range to other product categories and previously non-penetrated meal occasions such as Lunch and Breakfast
We see a great opportunity by expanding the scope of meal offerings: We have not only successfully introduced surcharge offerings in all markets, such as “premium meals”, extra recipes and double portions. We are also rolling out an increasing offering of add-ons, such as breakfast options, snacks, lunch, appetizers and sides. In the Benelux countries and most recently in the United States, we launched HelloFresh Market, a curated assortment of grocery items, everyday essentials and quick meal solutions that allows our customers to order complementary products to their HelloFresh dinner kits. In the Benelux we have already scaled up the number of available add-ons from 150 items to 300 items to date, and we intend to expand our range significantly.
All together, HelloFresh is a lot more than “just” meal kits, even today. Our current product suite of offerings already includes many options for different customer segments beyond the typical meal kit customers and we’ll work hard to increase the relevance of our assortment in the future. Our unique scale and data-driven approach will allow us to be very successful.