HelloFresh Opens Marketing Playbook

Fellow Forbes contributor Aaron Kwittken sat down with HelloFresh VP of marketing Matt Fitzgerald to get a glimpse of how the company—which is now the No. 1 in the meal kit business, with more than 890,000 customers—intends to grow even more. 

One key, according to Kwittken, is that HelloFresh seems to be very focused on creating content as a core part of its marketing strategy.  

Fitzerald said the company has always been a very customer-centric brand, and what’s been really fun with the rise of content is allowing its customers to play a participatory role in content creation. HelloFresh looks to them, he said, and their social communities to identify the topics and components of home-cooking and eating that are most exciting. A lot of time, content is actually user-generated, he said. 

Kwittken broached how Amazon and Whole Foods are entering the meal kit business in a huge way, and asked how HelloFresh will deal with that reality. Fitzgerald said the company feels confident it is building a differentiated brand.

“We have this incredible direct-to-consumer feedback loop. We listen to our customers so closely every week, and now we have six years of data on recipe preferences, culinary preferences, ingredient preferences [and] seasonal preferences, and we’re using that to make the product better and more customizable, to lead to stronger personalization in the future,"  Fitzgerald said. "We believe that, globally, nobody has that level of insight. We’re confident that we’ll be able to continue to build at a very fast pace and grow quickly."

Related:Making the Most of Meal Kits

A lesson for every supermarket and grocerant to pay attention to: Data is key.