How meal kits address two major trends in 2021

2020 was a turbulent year for all of us. It was marked by uncertainty, a radical focus on health and safety and adapting to entirely new situations - it’s essentially turned all of our lives upside down. In the midst of all of this, we have seen trends develop and solidify - like ordering groceries online and cooking at home. I’d like to highlight two strong developments that I’ve been observing with great interest.  

1. The increasing importance of Sustainability

While it may have seemed like we were heavily preoccupied by the pandemic, sustainability has never been as important as it is now. On a business side, ESG is becoming increasingly relevant, defining everything from a company’s impact on the environment and society to how and what a company needs to report on. Businesses are required to take action and we need to ensure that our business exceeds all stakeholder’s expectations.  

At the same time, consumers are becoming more and more sensitive to environmental, social and corporate impact/responsibility. They look at the products they purchase much more closely, including how they shop for and prepare food. While our business model is inherently sustainable, we definitely see the need to take extra steps and measures, some of which we’re already doubling down on. 

These include: 

• offsetting our carbon footprint
• developing new packaging materials and 
• ensuring that food waste is kept to an absolute minimum (already significantly less than 1% of all purchased ingredients go to waste in our production facilities and an average of 21% less food is wasted in consumers homes when they cook a HelloFresh meal as opposed to cooking the same meal with ingredients bought in a grocery store)

For us a strong focus over the last 2 years was to establish the right metrics and frameworks to track and trace our environmental and sustainability footprint in as much granular detail as possible. We don’t just want to tell you qualitatively what we do but also be held accountable to it. While we’re already making lots of progress, which we’ll actually be publishing in our upcoming Sustainability report next week, we understand that there’s much more to be done.   

2. New consumer habits

It’s become quite apparent that there has been a massive acceleration in digitization over the course of the past year. E-commerce saw an increase in the first half of 2020 that was as high as it’s growth in the previous 10 years. This was also reflected in the food delivery sector. 

It’s now more than ever that consumers are looking to shop for food online. And most importantly: They’re expected to continue to do so and home cooking will continue to be popular. In a study conducted by Oracle, 61% of consumers reported that they bought groceries online during the pandemic. A whopping 92% of consumers surveyed said that they’d continue to shop for food online going forward (source). 

We have seen similar responses at HelloFresh when asking our customers if they intend to cook more, the same or less as the pandemic phases out. Turns out, if you deliver a great product, consumers are longing to have a long-term relationship with you and our data clearly shows that customers have developed sticky new habits. For many, the pandemic provided an opportunity to try something new and change long held purchase behaviors. 

At HelloFresh we are very excited for 2021 and can’t wait to see how it unfolds. In the meantime I encourage you to have a look at our soon to be released sustainability report and learn more about the specific steps we take to improve across all ESG dimensions.