HelloFresh Group Revenues Climb in Q2

Despite cycling peak COVID-related demand a year ago, HelloFresh Group posted a 66.5% increase in global revenues in its fiscal second quarter on a constant currency basis, the Berlin-based meal-kit company said.

The sales growth came due to capacity increases, newly acquired businesses including ready-to-eat services such as Factor in the U.S., a market launch in Norway, and through assortment expansion, including a newly available pantry offering in the U.S.

In the U.S., HelloFresh said quarterly revenue increased by 61% to 846.9 million euros (about $992 million) or by 66.5% on a constant currency basis. Customer counts increased by 92.9% to 3.8 million.

And though order frequency and order value were down from a year ago in the U.S., those metrics were up on a two-year basis, indicating the company made progress through the pandemic, officials said.

“The second quarter of 2021 has been a strong success for HelloFresh. We delivered very meaningful growth across both segments, despite a tough benchmark, given that Q2 2020 was probably the peak lock-down quarter,”Dominik Richter, CEO of HelloFresh, said in a statement. “During Q2 2021 we have made further strong progress in ramping up our production capacity and infrastructure globally, while launching Norway as a new market, bringing Green Chef as an additional brand to the U.K. market and extending our HelloFresh Markets offering of high-quality curated add-ons to the U.S. We are laying the foundations for reaching our mid-term revenue target of €10 billion revenue and charging towards becoming the leading global food solutions group.”

In a conference call with analysts discussing results, Richter said the company would be careful about passing along product price increases to customers, saying the company was buying better, and adjusting formulations where necessary. “We can cope well with a certain level of ingredient price inflation,” he said, according to a Sentieo transcript.

“We haven't done any large-scale price increases and will most likely not do them,” he added. “I think we've always seen that if we can have very competitive pricing, both vs. competition but also vs. supermarkets, that really helps us with the order rates of our existing customers, [and] acquiring new customers. … We think price competitiveness is a key variable for consumers to buy meal kits. And if we can keep prices stable and optimize around the margin, that will make all products in relation to overall supermarket prices, which see inflation, as well as that of competition.”