For years, the backbone of HelloFresh’s global business rested on a process that looked straightforward from the outside. A chef created a dish, a food stylist prepared it, photographers captured it, editors refined instructions, and a production team turned the content into a print-ready recipe card that went out to customers. Behind the scenes, this workflow routinely stretched across weeks or months, slowing the company’s ability to release new meals and limiting flexibility across its 18-country footprint.
HelloFresh has now compressed that timeline into a matter of hours.
The world’s largest meal-kit provider has deployed a generative AI system that automates nearly all production tasks involved in creating recipe cards. These cards guide millions of customers through their weekly meals, and the AI system reduces production time from months to hours. With it, HelloFresh can bring new dishes to market faster and adjust menus more efficiently based on customer feedback, food trends, or ingredient availability across different geographies.
The system is already live in the United States. Customers began receiving AI-generated recipe cards in November, with printed versions included in boxes from early December. A global rollout is planned by the end of Q1 2026. For a company serving hundreds of millions of meals each quarter across eight brands in the US, UK, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Australia, Austria, Switzerland, Canada, New Zealand, Sweden, France, Denmark, Norway, Italy, Ireland, and Spain, the change represents one of its most significant operational shifts since the company was founded in 2011.
A Production Bottleneck Across a Global Network
HelloFresh’s brand promise has always relied on variety and clarity. Customers expect constantly updated menus and standardized instructions they can follow without difficulty. But as the business expanded geographically, its production workflow struggled to keep pace.
Recipe cards required extensive photography, retouching, editing, layout design, formatting, and multiple rounds of review. These cycles grew even longer as the company scaled and launched new international brands. Although chefs could develop recipes quickly, the production phase delayed when those recipes reached customers.
The company has acknowledged that this step frequently took “several weeks or even months.” The delay limited how quickly HelloFresh could respond to regional trends, incorporate seasonal ingredients, or apply customer feedback to upcoming menus.
The new AI system was built to address this constraint directly.
From Months to Hours
HelloFresh’s in-house generative AI engine automates the production and design components of recipe card creation. It completes layout, formatting, design standardization, and transformation of chef-authored content into consistent, print-ready recipe cards across all HelloFresh brands and markets.
Unlike off-the-shelf tools, this system is trained entirely on proprietary data: a database of 15,000 recipes developed over 14 years and taste preference feedback from 18 markets. According to Assaf Ronen, Group President of HelloFresh and CEO of HelloFresh US, this dataset forms the core advantage:
“This extensive dataset is the perfect foundation for our own GenAI system. While many companies use off-the-shelf AI tools, far fewer are able to build proprietary GenAI solutions that meaningfully boost productivity and ultimately deliver an even better product experience.”
Every dish remains developed by HelloFresh’s culinary teams. Chefs continue to create and test recipes, and food stylists verify visual accuracy. Human oversight is central, but the time-intensive design and production steps have been decoupled from the creative work.
Recipe cards that once required weeks of manual effort now appear within hours.
Reworking the Workflow, Not Speeding Up the Old One
Internally, HelloFresh reconsidered the entire production pipeline rather than trying to accelerate each stage. The company has described how its initial workflow involved dozens of steps built for a manual production environment. Instead of automating each step separately, the team restructured the sequence around the outcome they needed: fast, consistent, and accurate recipe cards aligned with culinary output.
The transition required several weeks of internal testing. During the first six to eight weeks, the system produced drafts while human editors maintained full control. The AI initially displayed issues typical of early-stage generative systems, including hallucinations and inconsistent priorities. Human editors remained the primary decision-makers, reviewing drafts and providing correction data that shaped model behavior.
As the system improved and consistently matched quality expectations, staff shifted into a review-first mode. Only when the system delivered clear, accurate, and standardized outputs across brands did HelloFresh move to full deployment in the US.
Today, every US menu runs through this AI-supported production process. The global rollout is in progress.
Part of a Broader AI and Automation Strategy
The recipe card engine is one part of HelloFresh’s larger AI-driven transformation. The company has invested for more than eight years in machine learning across forecasting, menu planning, personalization, and logistics.
In 2024, Bloomberg reported that HelloFresh invested US$70 million in AI-driven menu expansion that would more than double weekly meal offerings in the US from 45 to over 100. That investment also included AI-powered robotics in distribution centers to speed up order packing. The recipe card system aligns with these broader efforts to modernize operations and support a larger variety of meals.
The new production workflow allows HelloFresh to adjust menus more quickly. Regional ingredient availability, customer taste feedback, and market-specific considerations can now be implemented without long production delays. If a customer swaps ingredients or chooses another variant, the AI system can generate updated instructions directly instead of relying on generic substitutions.
HelloFresh says the system maintains design consistency across its eight brands while still allowing adaptations for regional preferences. HelloFresh has been clear that AI does not participate in recipe creation. Culinary experts continue to develop dishes, test ingredient combinations, and refine recipes independently. The AI system does not design meals; it prepares the production-ready cards that accompany them.
Quality control remains human-led. AI ensures formatting and consistency, but final validation stays with culinary teams.
HelloFresh’s advantage in building the system is its dataset of recipes and customer feedback accumulated since 2011. The company has recorded which cooking steps customers find confusing, phrasing that improves clarity, and insights into preferred instruction styles. This data allows the AI system to generate recipe cards in the company’s established communication style.
Assaf Ronen characterizes the shift in the company’s operational identity as a significant evolution:
“HelloFresh is transforming from a food company that does tech into a tech company that does food.”
A More Scalable Recipe Workflow
With the AI system now live, HelloFresh can synchronize its recipe production pace with its culinary development rhythm. Seasonal dishes can be finalized closer to launch windows. Menu changes can incorporate customer feedback more quickly. Regional preferences can shape weekly offerings without the previous time lag created by manual design cycles.
The new system also supports HelloFresh’s presence across 18 markets by ensuring consistent formatting and instructions across brands while still enabling market-specific customization when needed.
HelloFresh’s generative AI system addresses a long-standing operational constraint by automating the time-intensive production phase of recipe card creation. The change reduces production time from weeks or months to hours and aligns recipe card output with the company’s global scale across 18 markets and eight brands.
The system automates layout, formatting, and design while preserving human control over recipe development and visual validation. HelloFresh has launched the system in the US, with printed recipe cards already appearing in customer boxes, and a global rollout scheduled by the end of Q1 2026.
By applying GenAI to a core operational process, HelloFresh has increased capacity for culinary teams to focus on development and refinement while ensuring consistent, accurate, and high-quality recipe cards informed by 15,000 recipes and more than a decade of customer feedback.
