Meal kit producer HelloFresh relies on automation to guarantee fresh and accurate shipments to customers—and that reliance has only increased as the company has grown from a small German startup to a global enterprise serving consumers in 18 countries. Surging demand, expanding menus, and the ever-present challenge of meeting high food quality and safety standards add complexity to the HelloFresh model, necessitating a focus on technologies that can give the business an edge as it grows.
Zeroing in on the U.S. market, company leaders took a leap nearly five years ago that would help HelloFresh meet burgeoning local demand and set the stage for further expansion of its menu and capabilities. They added a brand-new distribution center (DC) in Irving, Texas, that would feature the most advanced technology in the company's North American fulfillment network to date.
"Once we had identified that we were moving toward a greenfield site, we saw the opportunity to have an enhanced fulfillment system in the building," Kyle DeGroot, vice president of operations engineering and technology for HelloFresh, says of the Irving project. "We wanted the capability to expand our product offering while maintaining or increasing efficiency from a fulfillment standpoint."
The answer to that challenge: an automated storage and retrieval system (AS/RS) from AutoStore. The system is now the centerpiece of a customized, high-tech fulfillment process that is speeding operations, increasing throughput, and improving productivity—all while giving HelloFresh the flexibility to shift and expand its menu without complicating the fulfillment process.
TAMING COMPLEXITY
HelloFresh was founded in 2011 in Berlin and has grown from its early days as a community-based business into a global organization that delivered more than 1 billion meals to customers in 2023, according to company data. Faced with escalating demand in the U.S., HelloFresh set out to expand its fulfillment network in 2020, adding the 377,000-square-foot Irving facility and bringing the company's U.S. fulfillment network to a total of eight DCs.
More than that, the Irving DC was an opportunity to advance the company's use of automated warehouse technology and build on its presence in the Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan area—both because of the facility's size and because it was a greenfield site, offering a blank slate for innovation. The goal was to leverage the reliability, density, and speed of AutoStore as the heart of an automated meal kit assembly process, according to HelloFresh and leaders at Swisslog, the material handling automation specialist that designed and installed the AutoStore system.
For Swisslog, the project represented a departure from typical AS/RS installations, which are designed to handle traditional distribution center operations, including e-commerce and store fulfillment.
"HelloFresh is in the distribution business, shipping meals to the home. However, once we took a closer look at [the business], we [realized] that it acted more like a production operation," explains Colman Roche, vice president of AutoStore solutions for Swisslog Americas. "Items are moving in and out faster than in a typical system." That's because HelloFresh orders need to be filled quickly and under precise conditions to meet food freshness and safety standards. And there are a lot of moving parts: HelloFresh subscribers can customize their meal plans from more than 100 weekly menu and market item offerings and choose the day of the week they want orders delivered. The company sources meal ingredients to minimize the time between receipt and shipping, and carefully packages components to ensure freshness and simplify preparation.
The meal kits themselves may include fresh produce, starches, seasonings, recipe cards, and nutritional information along with proteins—such as fish, chicken, and beef. Subscribers can also supplement their meals with snacks, desserts, and other items from the HelloFresh Market. As a result, a typical HelloFresh outbound container includes 16 items, which must be packed in a prescribed sequence. The entire process is conducted in a chilled environment that is maintained at 33 degrees Fahrenheit.
"That insight [into the nature of HelloFresh's operations] allowed us to take a different look at the system design and come up with something that flowed more easily [in a production environment]," Roche explains.
PUTTING THE SYSTEM TO WORK
HelloFresh uses varying levels of automation at its facilities around the world, but the AutoStore system in Irving is by far the most advanced, according to DeGroot, who describes the project as a unique application of the technology. Unlike typical installations—in which orders are initiated within the AutoStore and work their way through the fulfillment process via picking stations, pack out, and eventually to shipping—orders begin outside the AutoStore, in a manual pick zone. Orders are then inducted into the AutoStore via conveyor in a sequence that maximizes throughput and worker productivity.
Roche and DeGroot describe the process as follows: Orders are initiated in a manual pick zone, where box assembly begins with proteins and ice packs. Boxed orders are then transported by conveyor and inducted into the AutoStore in a controlled sequence and dynamically grouped in batches of four based on commonalities across the orders.
The partial orders are then delivered to pickers working at carousel ports, along with bins of ingredients from the AutoStore inventory that are needed to complete the order—this allows workers to pick directly into cartons at the AutoStore ports. Workers can fulfill four orders simultaneously, maximizing the number of picks they make from each bin. Inventory is replenished through the system's 11 induction ports to maintain freshness.
Downstream from the AutoStore, orders are conveyed to automated carton sealers and labeling equipment, and then sorted for shipping.
Swisslog's SynQ warehouse execution system (WES) manages the entire process—including routing, picking across all zones, replenishment, sortation, and label printing. SynQ also provides centralized inventory management and visibility based on a first-expired, first-out (FEFO) strategy that helps ensure freshness. The WES is integrated with the facility's warehouse management system (WMS) as well.
"[SynQ] is the brain behind everything, bringing it all together," says DeGroot.
Getting the system up and running was no small accomplishment, given its size and scale. The cube-based AS/RS takes up 100,000 square feet of the facility's total 377,000 square feet of space. It includes 150 robots, nearly 30,000 storage bins, 18 carousel ports for picking, 11 conveyor ports for induction, four quality assurance ports, 6,000 feet of conveyor, four carton erectors, 12 protein pick zones with pick-to-light cells, a sortation system, and carton sealing and labeling equipment.
HUMMING ALONG
HelloFresh went live with the Irving AutoStore in 2022 and has been operating at full production since 2023. Company leaders say the system is 25% more efficient and accurate while shipping 20% more recipes compared to the rest of its fulfillment network. One of the biggest benefits is flexibility: Today, HelloFresh can easily expand its menu, adding recipes and ingredients without introducing complexity into the fulfillment process—all thanks to the software integration, synchronization, and the power of the AutoStore.
"This is something we could not have done before," DeGroot says, emphasizing the scale, speed, and flexibility of the system. "And it's the reason we use the Irving facility for expansion initiatives."
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