Informatica powers HelloFresh’s data-driven expansion

Today HelloFresh operates in 17 countries and delivered 287.3 million meals to 8.5 million customers in Q1 2022. It has seen exponential growth in the five years since it went public, launching in new countries, opening new brands, and acquiring Greenchef, Youfoodz and Factor. This rapid expansion saw the business tackling increasing challenges around the volume, complexity and obscurity of data. 

Recognising the value of being data-driven, HelloFresh embarked on a company-wide initiative to shift how data is perceived, managed, and used across the business. Core to this transformation is the global technology department HelloTech, one of the company’s fastest-growing teams, having doubled its size in the past two years and now home to almost 1,000 engineers, designers, data engineers, data scientists, product managers, and analysts. This team plays a critical role in democratizing data across the business, enabling teams to make business decisions and deliver product innovations that are based on solid analysis of millions of data points. 

Informatica enables enterprises to manage, own and derive insights from their data, which made it a good fit for HelloFresh’s data-driven journey to treating data as a product. Leveraging Informatica’s Enterprise Data Catalog, HelloFresh first increased transparency on its data footprint and then set out to make it discoverable and interoperable. Today, with the help of Informatica’s Axon Data Governance solutions, HelloFresh has increased its ability to deliver trusted, relevant data to users across the business, reducing the time from data to insight. This is noticeable in domains and teams that embarked on the Data Governance journey as early adopters. 

HelloFresh operates in a data-driven way. Data is not only a resource for technological improvements and scaling the business but is also the base of every team's day-to-day work. All business decisions, including product innovations, are based on the analysis of millions of data-points to build a desirable product for customers. 

The company’s intelligent data management approach expands beyond technology. HelloFresh recognized the shift required in the organizational mindset and established a Data Literacy Program to change how data is perceived and embed success criteria for data-related initiatives. There has been great success in the process of moving away from excel spreadsheets and embedding data directly into business operations. 

“Data is HelloFresh’s most precious resource and, working with Informatica, we’ve been able to serve it up as a strategic asset to teams across the business, who use it to accelerate our mission to change the way people eat,” said David Castro-Gavino, Global VP Data at HelloFresh. “By empowering our teams with access to the right data at the right time and the know-how to use it, we can continue to offer customers fresh, healthy, affordable meals tailored to their tastes.” 

In celebration of its success in driving a data-led transformation, HelloFresh was recognized as a data innovator in the 2022 Informatica Innovation Awards. 

“HelloFresh is a fantastic example of an intelligent data enterprise – harnessing data as a strategic asset to fuel innovation, improve customer service and drive impressive growth,” said Jitesh Ghai, Chief Product Officer, Informatica. “We were pleased to recognize the HelloFresh team in our Innovation Awards. We look forward to working together as they continue their data-driven journey, democratizing data at scale across the business to foster fast-paced innovation.”