Hello Fresh: the search for the right IT ingredients

From packing food parcels in the founder’s living room to delivering a million ready-to-cook meals every year: the pace at which Hello Fresh has grown over the past three years has been nothing short of extraordinary.

Now firmly established as the leader in its market, Hello Fresh delivers boxes of fresh produce onto thousands of doorsteps every day, along with a selection of recipes to help customers turn their ingredients into delicious meals.

It’s an amazing feat of logistics, ensuring that hundreds of different ingredients – including fresh fish, vegetables and meats – all arrive in pristine condition at customers’ doors, in the exact quantities they need to make their evening meals. Late deliveries or missing ingredients mean hungry customers, and that leaves a bad taste.

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Hello Fresh has expanded at such a remarkable rate – 500% growth every year so far – that the founders freely admit they’ve barely had time to stop and think. The company has outgrown London’s biggest courier firm, its offices, and now its IT equipment. With the company about to move into a stunning new headquarters in London’s West End, it has decided now is the time to get serious about standardising its in-house IT equipment.

Until now, Hello Fresh had taken a typical start-up’s approach to buying its office hardware. PCs, laptops, tablets, printers and other kit were simply bought on demand, as and when the company needed them. If a new staff member joined the ever-expanding customer service team, accountant/IT technician Danny Lam would go online and order them a new laptop. If a laptop hard disk failed, it was back to the shop to order another one.

The ad-hoc approach to IT procurement has seen the company through its start-up phase, but the strain is beginning to show as the demands of the business increase. Staff working with spreadsheets now containing tens of thousands of customer records are finding their three-year-old laptops are struggling to cut through that quantity of data. Designers using graphics packages to touch-up recipe cards are finding it’s taking longer and longer to get the job finished. Even printing those recipe cards involves a trip to a local repro house, because the office printer isn’t up to the task.

The start-up has come of age at the same time that the IT equipment is beginning to show its age. Hello Fresh has realised that it needs the office hardware to match its ambition.

Over the past couple of months, Hello Fresh has identified the office IT equipment it requires to meet the demands of a maturing business. It has examined the requirements of every staff member, whether that be the customer service agent entering data into a web form, the sales staff taking orders on tablets on customers’ doorsteps, or the finance manager whose job it is to analyse all the key business metrics.

The company has now bought a fleet of new desktop PCs, workstations, laptops, monitors and other equipment. Instead of a mish-mash of PCs and laptops from various manufacturers with varying specs, Hello Fresh will have a standardised set of hardware from a single vendor, HP, instantly making it easier to maintain and administer.

Over the next few months we’ll be following Hello Fresh’s progress as it takes delivery of the new equipment, assessing the impact that the HP hardware will have on the company and its staff. It’s time to see if another set of the right ingredients will make a big difference to Hello Fresh.

For more advice on transforming your business, visit HP BusinessNow