HelloFresh Donates 500K Pounds of Food in September

Meal kit company and its customers rev up efforts for Hunger Action Month

9/29/2021

a group of people standing in front of a store

HelloFresh optimizes its food supply to simultaneously make meal kits and donate surpluses to those in need.

Hunger Action Month isn’t even over yet, and HelloFresh announced that it has given 500,000 pounds of food to charity partners around the country in September. For the year to date, the meal kit provider has donated about 5.2 million pounds of food as part of its Beyond the Box initiative.

Because of the nature of making regularly-rotating, precisely-portioned meal kits, HelloFresh goes through its food ingredient inventory relatively quickly and is able to determine which foods can be donated before they are spoiled or close to the use-by date. That allows the company to reduce food waste and assist community members in need through donations of surplus fresh food delivered via a network of more than 20 charitable partners.

“Reducing food waste and combating food insecurity are core values at HelloFresh and through our various social impact initiatives, like Beyond the Box, we can address both issues,” said Uwe Voss, CEO of HelloFresh U.S. “We are extremely grateful to our various partners and our customers for helping us to work towards positive, lasting change in our local communities.”

In addition to donations to food banks, food rescue organizations, local governments, corporate partners and other nonprofits that work to address food insecurity, HelloFresh provides its customers with opportunities to gift meal kits to those in need via a Meals in Meaning program available on the app. According to company information, there was a 25% increase in customer contributions during Hunger Action Month this September.

Hunger Action Month was started by the Feeding America organization. So far in 2021, HelloFresh has provided nearly a million pounds of food to that group alone.

Based in Berlin, with U.S. offices in New York, HelloFresh SE is the world’s leading meal kit company and operates in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, The Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Australia, Austria, Switzerland, Canada, New Zealand, Sweden, France and Denmark. The company is No. 75 on The PG 100, Progressive Grocer's 2021 list of the top retailers of food and consumables in North America.