At HelloFresh Group we ship around 150 million ingredients per week globally. Buying them from our approximately 2,000 suppliers, bringing them to one of our 42 production sites, packing or cooking the products and then delivering them to our customers in 18 countries is a highly complex process that heavily relies on our supply chain management tech team. 

Jake Fear, VP Fulfillment at HelloFresh, is leading our Fulfillment Tech alliance and shared insights on how his team is driving the rapid expansion of our ready-to-eat brand Factor.

Tell us about your personal journey before HelloFresh.

In my early career I worked as a software engineer for smaller companies. My first leadership experience was with Sony where I was responsible for the overall software development of commerce, content management and customer support tools for the PlayStation Network. After that I worked at Google where I rounded out my experience being responsible for marketing automation and later customer support tools for agents around the world. 
When I joined Amazon in 2020, this was the first time I was tapping into the world of supply chain and building warehouse management systems for their food selections. I always found it very exciting to combine physical products with computing and I’m thrilled about the exciting opportunities I can see in this regard here at HelloFresh. 

What is your team working on?

Fulfillment Tech is generally responsible for increasing the productivity of the workforce in our fulfillment center and helping to reduce errors in the production process. A project I am particularly proud of is the single warehouse management solution we are bringing to Europe this  year and that we are rolling out globally in the future. It will make our warehouse management much more effective by making the placement and lifecycle of ingredients more clear (with less effort) and allow us to better harmonize processes across physical locations and brands.
Furthermore we are currently developing automated solutions for our fulfillment centres. Our two newest production sites in Germany and the UK have started operating just recently - and my team was heavily involved in building out and maintaining the technology at both sites. 

One of our most automated fulfillment centers in Barleben, Germany.

Can you explain the biggest challenge in Fulfillment Tech for HelloFresh?

HelloFresh has a very unique product offering, which is why we cannot just simply buy third party tech solutions to support our operations like traditional retailers. Finding the right balance between building our own tech solutions while making effective use of service providers is a challenging task that our business model brings for my team.

One of the biggest challenges we have is the local differences between markets, for example on the regulatory side or the speed with which ingredients can be obtained. Our goal is to create a good set of global tech systems that will improve our fulfillment management, while taking into account necessary complexity specific to individual markets. These might be not only on the regulatory side, but also can differentiate due to the specific location of the production site and its connection to wholesalers or different food waste management on the ground. 

Our ready-to-eat product category is rapidly growing. Do we need a different tech approach compared to meal kits?

The production approach for ready-to-eat meals is very different from meal kits, since the cooking process happens in our facilities. While we use mostly quantity measurements for meal kits, we rely on weight measurements for ready-to-eat products, which makes the tech approach different for procurement and inbounding. At the same time, every ingredient has a different weight, or yield, before and after cooking - this is what we call the “mushroom problem” (mushrooms tend to lose a lot of water during the cooking process, considerably reducing their weight). 

To scale our ready-to-eat operations we also work on integrating automated cooking machines into our production process. With our Australian ready-to-eat brand Youfoodz we have already gained lots of experience in this regard that will help grow Factor further.

What are your main focus areas for the next year?

Enabling our ready-to-eat expansion will be the biggest focus for my team. At the same time we will work on enhancing supply chain resilience and reducing errors in all our production facilities. This will also happen through increasing the level of automation across all brands, which I’m particularly excited about.