HelloFresh Eyes Long-Term Growth With 2 New Distribution Centers

Meal kit company HelloFresh announced Aug. 31 the leasing of two new distribution centers—one in Newnan, Ga., and the other in Irving, Texas—to better serve new and existing customers and support increasing demand in key Southeastern and central-Texas locations.

The 210,000-square-foot facility in Georgia—teased during HelloFresh’s second-quarter earnings call in August—is the company’s first in the Southeast and will begin operating in third-quarter 2020. Hello Fresh CEO Dominik Richter said during the earnings call that it “should correspondingly give us the potential to increase revenues by about 25% from the current baseline.”

The Georgia center will also support shorter delivery distances throughout the region and provide job opportunities to more than 750 workers across operations, meal distribution and management roles.

Projected to be operational by the end of first-quarter 2021, the Texas distribution center will increase overall meal kit production and distribution capacity by more than 30%, HelloFresh said. At nearly 375,000 square foot, the facility will be the company’s largest to date and will include office space, cold storage and packing and shipping areas.

Alongside its current facility in Grand Prairie, Texas, the new center in Irving augments existing production and shipping capabilities in the Dallas-Fort Worth metro area while providing as many as 1,200 new jobs as HelloFresh expands its presence to continue supporting growing demand and new customer growth in the South and Midwest regions of the U.S.

“These latest centers support our investment in long-term growth as we execute on our strategy to continue expanding our total addressable market through fresh geographies, new customer segments and various demographics,” said Uwe Voss, CEO of HelloFresh U.S. “To achieve this, we are expanding supply chain capacity and actively iterating on our menu to satisfy new and existing customers, expanding recipe selection, adding more convenient offerings and increasing meal customization options to maintain our long-term growth momentum.”

Berlin-based HelloFresh operates in the U.S., the U.K., Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Australia, Austria, Switzerland, Canada, New Zealand, France, Sweden and Denmark. It delivered 149 million meals to 4.18 million customers worldwide in second-quarter 2020.