Stories
Nov 16, 2020
"We have to use resources responsibly and respect the limits of our planet."
In conversation with Tilman Eichstädt, Senior Vice President of Supply, Product & Sustainability at HelloFresh.
Making food supply and consumption as sustainable as possible is an integral part of HelloFresh's business model. In the following interview, Tilman Eichstädt, Senior Vice President of Supply, Product & Sustainability at HelloFresh sheds some light on what this means in detail. Tilman is responsible for HelloFresh’s product development, packaging, procurement and sustainability in the International segment (all markets except for the U.S.) and has been with HelloFresh for the last four and a half years.
What does sustainability mean for HelloFresh?
Tilman: Our mission at HelloFresh is to change the way people eat forever. We are aiming for a holistic change that includes our community, our people and our planet. For us this means that we don’t only provide our customers with inspirational recipes and fresh ingredients every week, but also that we develop an innovative supply chain that respects the planet, its boundaries and its people. We want to ensure the sustainability of our business model and further develop it, especially with regards to key environmental issues such as reducing food waste, lowering carbon emissions, minimizing packaging and sourcing ingredients sustainably. Bottom line: as a company we need to be aware of our responsibility and our impact. That’s why we must use resources responsibly and respect the limits of our planet.
One of the greatest challenges facing humanity in the future will be to enable eight to ten billion people to live a comfortable life here on earth. We won’t achieve this if we continue to consume and use our resources at the same rate as we have been over the past 20 to 30 years.
We need to adapt our lifestyle and our demand for resources so that everyone can be provided with balanced and healthy food. Current estimates show that one third of the food produced in the world is not eaten because it is either wasted in the supply chain or thrown away by customers. By contributing to a massive reduction of this waste, we want to achieve change. Our goal is to precisely analyze the waste of food we purchase from our supplies and ideally bring it down to zero. If we can contribute to reducing the rate of food waste for the entire food industry with our already very low rate of one to two percent, that would be a great success. I see this as part of my personal and also HelloFresh's social responsibility. It is important for everyone at our company to make a change. One important factor is certainly that our workforce is quite young. They therefore belong to the generations that will directly experience the effects of the way we are currently handling the planet.
How concrete are HelloFresh’s sustainability efforts?
Tilman: Sustainability is a part of everything we do – no matter what department or position we work in. In principle we focus on four core topics:
Reducing and optimizing packaging
HelloFresh is a data-driven company. That’s why it is important for us to base our sustainability efforts on a data-driven approach. We are currently working to identify key measurable figures. These include the amount of food waste in our production facilities at the end of any given week, the amount of surplus food that is donated, the amount of packaging we use and the amount of carbon emissions we cause. With this new system we ensure continuous improvement. We also work closely with recognized experts, such as the Wuppertal Institute in Germany, Wageningen University in the Netherlands, Terrapass in the USA and Planetly to analyze and reduce our ecological footprint. Another big project we are currently working on is a materiality assessment, a 360° view of our impact on the environment. We are asking a broad group of stakeholders, from customers and suppliers to research institutes and environmental associations, where they see opportunities as well as challenges and a need for optimization.
Sustainability has been an important topic for HelloFresh for many years now. Are there any milestones you and your team are especially proud of?
Tilman: Yes, definitely! For example, we reached a large milestone for the cooling system in our boxes. Our ice packs are now 100% water-based – our customers can even reuse the content without any concern, for example to water their flowers. We’ve also been able to further reduce the use of plastic in shipping packaging by introducing the Paper Pouch, a cooling pouch made entirely of recyclable paper. We have already implemented the Paper Pouch in our markets in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Sweden and Denmark.
For ingredients for which adequate plastic-free packaging options don’t exist yet, we predominantly switched to mono material in the form of lightweight plastic. This increases the recyclability considerably. If you take a look at a conventional yoghurt cup for example, it usually consists of three different components: a plastic lid, an aluminum lid and the cup itself. If these materials are not correctly separated during disposal, sorting machines won’t be able to identify them and they may ultimately not be recycled. That’s why we are introducing mono material solutions with significantly less and only one type of plastic. We already switched the majority of all dairy products in Europe, such as cream and yogurt, accordingly.
Another milestone which we achieved was the launch of our self-operated delivery fleet for meal kits in the Netherlands. We have continued to work on the development of our electric vans and recently, together with Daimler-Benz, we put an electric van on the road that is fitted with a suitable cooling system for our boxes.
These changes might appear small to a customer, but in the background our experts and our suppliers work together around the clock, testing compositions, developing battery capacities and converting production machines.
Where do you still see the biggest challenges for HelloFresh in terms of sustainability?
Tilman: I think the two biggest challenges are packaging and food waste. We have already taken important steps with projects like the Paper Pouch, but we are continuously working on reducing and optimizing packaging. As a matter of principle, we only package what needs to be packaged for food safety and quality reasons. We can’t simply get rid of all packaging, we need to ensure that our customers receive their ingredients undamaged and chilled. That's why we work to optimize the balance between safe shipping and its ecological impact.
The second major challenge is to avoid food waste and wastefulness. We have already achieved a lot in this area. On average, our customers produce 21% less food waste with a HelloFresh dinner than with a meal they prepare using ingredients from traditional supermarkets. We are convinced that our distribution centers and our suppliers also generate significantly less food waste than a grocery retailer's supply chain, amongst others because we can guarantee a significantly shorter storage time at always optimal temperatures.
HelloFresh is the first global climate-neutral meal kit provider. What other plans does the market leader have for the future?
Tilman: First of all we want to continue to contribute to decarbonization, for example by purchasing more green electricity, generating more of our own solar power and enabling low-emission delivery, like through electric Vans. We also want to steadily improve in avoiding waste and plastic. Another goal – admittedly one that is difficult to benchmark – is to become the industry leader in the area of efficient and diligent handling of food. In this context, we are also looking at possible regulations that could affect the food industry in the future, such as carbon labelling for all products. In our case this would also mean marking each individual dish with the corresponding footprint. This would create a deeper awareness for sustainable nutrition amongst our customers.
A very concrete trend that we are currently working on is vegan meals. We see that plant-based diets are trending in many countries, including some of our markets. This is definitely an area which HelloFresh is going to progress in the near future.