Cooking Up Customer Insights: How HelloFresh Accelerated Its First-Party Data Strategy

Background

HelloFresh is a leading global digital-first fast moving consumer goods(FMCG) group that has transformed the traditional food supply chain through direct-to-consumer meal kits. The company operates across 18 active markets and employs over 20,000 staff across 100 nationalities. As David Castro Gavino, Global Vice President of Data at HelloFresh, explains:

"HelloFresh isn't just a meal company. We are a transformative force on how people experience food."
David Castro Gavino, Global Vice President of Data, HelloFresh

HelloFresh differentiates itself through its data-driven approach, which is captured in its mantra: "if you can't measure it, you can't manage it." 

Data is at the heart of HelloFresh's DNA. Every customer interaction is captured and analyzed—from website clicks to delivery logistics. It is this focus that has helped the company’s marketing team to optimize campaigns, product team to tailor features based on behavioral trends, and operations team to fine-tune logistics.   

HelloFresh’s data architecture evolved into a unified platform called TARDIS. The platform was built on a Medallion architecture comprised of three key layers: 

• A bronze layer: Using AWS S3 for raw data ingestion
• A silver layer: Standardizing data in Snowflake
• A gold layer: Providing business-ready formats for real-time insights 

Despite developing this cutting edge architecture, HelloFresh was still struggling with its analytics. 

The company’s reliance on packaged analytics tools like Google Analytics created several obstacles that prevented it from becoming a truly data-driven organization. It was these obstacles that led HelloFresh on a journey to transform its approach to customer data. 

Challenges

HelloFresh’s reliance on packaged analytics solutions like Google Analytics created several major challenges. These issues threatened to undermine the company’s data-driven culture. Plus, it was impeding its ability to deliver exceptional customer experiences. 

Data Access Restrictions and Visibility Limitations

HelloFresh struggled with fragmented data across ten different systems. This created inherent inefficiencies in the company’s data operations. As David Castro Gavino explained:  

"We had fragmentation that created inherent inefficiencies because of the different legacy processes that we had. We had to integrate data across 10 different systems, juggling multiple tools, decoding a hundred documents. It often created IT and scaling costs, IT shadow systems, and scaling challenges across the entire ecosystem."
David Castro Gavino, Global Vice President of Data, HelloFresh

This fragmentation compromised HelloFresh’s data capture, with only 43% of new sessions recorded. Additionally, the “black box” nature of the packaged analytics solutions resulted in concerning accuracy discrepancies. David highlighted the severity of the problem: 

"Coupled with the black box nature of these tools that you sometimes find yourself using, we saw that accuracy in regards to some of our markets, when compared with our backend data, was dropping by up to 67%."
David Castro Gavino, Global Vice President of Data, HelloFresh

As a result of this lack of visibility, it became nearly impossible for HelloFresh to optimize its customer journeys. It also undermined confidence in data-driven decision making. As David aptly noted:

"When we're trying to personalize this experience, it's really hard to optimize that journey when we don't have the data to drive that change."
David Castro Gavino, Global Vice President of Data, HelloFresh

Low Data Quality and Poor Data Governance

HelloFresh’s reliance on third-party cookies created several vulnerabilities. 

"Our reliance on tools like Google Analytics exposed significant gaps in how we understood our user behavior because of that dependency on third-party cookies." 
David Castro Gavino, Global Vice President of Data, HelloFresh

Not only did this reliance affect data quality, but it also made it difficult to maintain clear data ownership, auditability, and version control. 

For a company with HelloFresh’s scale and complexity, these governance issues posed significant operational risks. They also hampered the company’s ability to create a unified data platform that could serve as a single source of truth. 

Privacy Compliance Risks

HelloFresh also had growing concerns about using third-party analytics tools due to the increasing stringence of privacy regulations like GDPR in Europe and CCPA in the U.S. Customer trust is everything to HelloFresh. And these concerns threatened the company’s ability to build trust with customers regarding data management practices. 

David emphasized the importance of trust in their customer relationships: 

"I want to make sure that my customers trust the way that we manage the data. That's something that is crucial for me."
David Castro Gavino, Global Vice President of Data, HelloFresh

Limited Real-Time Capabilities

HelloFresh's business model demands rapid insights to optimize campaigns, product features, and logistics operations. However, the company’s previous stack had significant latency issues, with data processing taking up to 36 hours. This delay severely limited HelloFresh’s ability to respond to changing customer behaviors and market conditions in real time.

Data Integration Challenges for AI Readiness

HelloFresh’s packaged analytics data was difficult for the team to combine with other customer datasets to create a customer 360 view. 

The format and structure of the data made it hard to engineer features for machine learning models and integrate with common BI tools. This affected HelloFresh’s ability to implement AI-powered use cases like personalization and recommendations. 

These challenges combined led HelloFresh to rethink its data strategy. As David summarized: 

"The first thing was recognizing these issues. And this is why we shifted to a first-party data strategy, because we wanted to ensure that we had complete control over all our data"
David Castro Gavino, Global Vice President of Data, HelloFresh

HelloFresh’s reliance on packaged analytics solutions was preventing it from achieving its mission of "changing the way people eat forever" through data-driven innovation. 

It therefore became clear that the company needed a more robust, transparent, and flexible approach to maintain its position as an industry leader.

Solution

Having recognized the limitations of its packaged analytics solutions, HelloFresh commenced its journey to a first-party data strategy. This evolution began with a thorough evaluation process of potential solutions. 

Implementing a First-Party Data Strategy with Snowplow and Snowflake

The evaluation process concluded with HelloFresh opting to carry out a proof of concept (PoC) with Snowplow to collect high-quality, real-time behavioral data. In addition, the company doubled down on its use of Snowflake as its unified data platform. David Castro Gavino explained: 

"We needed a solution that provided high-quality, real-time insights while also giving us full ownership of our entire data ecosystem."
David Castro Gavino, Global Vice President of Data, HelloFresh

With Snowflake and Snowplow, HelloFresh addressed its core requirements and gained solutions that could integrate with its existing TARDIS data architecture. David expanded on the solution selection process: 

"We embarked on a number of assessments of tools in the industry, and we started with a massive PoC with Snowplow. The whole intention of this process was to understand how we could potentially integrate the entire capability as a single source of truth."
David Castro Gavino, Global Vice President of Data, HelloFresh

Through the PoC, HelloFresh implemented Snowplow’s extensive capabilities to collect data across the company’s digital estate: 

1. Comprehensive data collection: From the outset, HelloFresh implemented Snowplow's extensive library of trackers. It implemented tracking across its web and mobile applications, ensuring every customer interaction was captured in a consistent, structured format.
   
   
2. Real-time data processing: The Snowplow pipeline delivered events to Snowflake in under five seconds. This addressed HelloFresh's critical requirement for real-time data availability. As David emphasized: 

"The first significant benefit was the near real-time processing. Over 99% of events were available in under five seconds."
David Castro Gavino, Global Vice President of Data, HelloFresh

3. Enhanced data quality management: HelloFresh also implemented Snowplow's data quality tooling, including validation against schemas and real-time alerting on data quality issues. As a result, the company ensured that the data flowing into its analytics environment maintained a high degree of accuracy and completeness.
   
   
4. First-party identity service: HelloFresh’s move away from third-party cookies to first-party data collection, enabled the company to track individual behavior for much longer periods. This was thanks to Snowplow’s ability to circumvent browser restrictions, while offering a more complete view of the customer journey.
   
   
5. Data governance and ownership: The Snowplow implementation gave HelloFresh full control over its data collection practices, ensuring compliance with privacy regulations while building customer trust through transparent data handling.
   
   

Integration with TARDIS Unified Data Platform

During the PoC, HelloFresh integrated Snowplow seamlessly within its TARDIS data platform. With Snowplow in place, the platform evolved to include: 

1. Bronze layer integration: Raw Snowplow events were initially captured in AWS S3, providing cost-effective storage for high-volume behavioral data.
   
2. Silver layer processing: The Snowplow data was then standardized and transferred to Snowflake. Here, it was made query-ready and consistent with HelloFresh's data model.
   
3. Gold layer enrichment: Finally, the data was further refined into aggregated, business-ready formats within Snowflake, delivering the real-time insights needed across the organization.
   

As David described it: 

"The full integration has been very transformative in regards to how we can centralize all our data. Because we now have this capability, we can empower teams to have more rapid, accurate insights and enable more agile data-driven decisions."
David Castro Gavino, Global Vice President of Data, HelloFresh

Building AI-Ready Customer Data

Snowplow’s data format is designed to power advanced analytics and AI use cases. HelloFresh made full use of this capability to gain a deeper understanding of the customer journey.

David highlighted the impact: 

"The PoC also demonstrated that we could increase our understanding of anonymous sessions by capturing up to 67% more data in some markets, giving us a much better picture of overall user behavior."
David Castro Gavino, Global Vice President of Data, HelloFresh

The rich contextual data further enhanced HelloFresh’s analytical capabilities: 

“The in-stream data included geolocation and device information. This enhanced data enables multi-touch attribution that helps us better understand the complete customer journey."
David Castro Gavino, Global Vice President of Data, HelloFresh

The PoC proved that Snowplow provided HelloFresh with what David called "the right tool for the right purpose,". With Snowplow, HelloFresh has created a transformative foundation for understanding and making full use of customer data throughout the organization. 

Additionally, the PoC allowed HelloFresh to break away from the limitations of packaged analytics and embrace a first-party data approach with Snowplow and Snowflake. And vitally, HelloFresh now has a robust, scalable foundation to power its data-driven innovation for years to come. 

Results

HelloFresh’s Snowplow PoC yielded impressive results and has transformed how the company uses customer data. 

Dramatically Improved Data Accuracy and Completeness

With Snowplow, HelloFresh achieved remarkable improvements in data quality. Previously, the company had trouble trusting its data. Now, its event tracking aligns more closely with its backend systems 95% of the time. This represents a significant improvement. As David Castro Gavino highlighted:

“In the testing that we did across both mobile and web, we achieved 95% parity with our backend systems. So, you can imagine the improvement - we were only losing 5% of the data, and I know that we can improve that even further."
David Castro Gavino, Global Vice President of Data, HelloFresh

Additionally, the company enhanced its data completeness.  It was able to capture up to 67% more data on anonymous sessions in some markets. This broader visibility provided a much more comprehensive picture of user behavior. And as a result, HelloFresh can deliver better personalization and experimentation with different offerings and user experiences.

Real-Time Data Availability

One of the most transformative outcomes was the reduction in data latency.  It went from 36 hours previously to just 5 seconds.  In addition, over 99% of events were available within this timeframe. This real-time capability empowered teams across HelloFresh to respond instantly to customer behaviors and market conditions.

Enhanced Customer Experience and Trust

Snowplow provided HelloFresh with richer contextual data. This includes geolocation and device information. With this richer information, HelloFresh can now better understand the complete customer journey through multi-touch attribution. And crucially, this insight has allowed HelloFresh to deliver targeted improvements to the customer experience. It has also achieved greater levels of personalization. 

Moreover, the shift to a first-party data strategy strengthened HelloFresh’s customer trust. The company now has improved privacy compliance and data protection, both of which are critical factors in HelloFresh's customer relationships.

Organizational Data Empowerment

The Snowplow and Snowflake PoC transformed how teams across HelloFresh use data. It has provided employees with centralized access to rapid, accurate insights and has enabled more agile, data-driven decisions. This democratization of data fostered a stronger data culture throughout the organization. It has also reinforced HelloFresh's position as a data-driven innovator in the food delivery space. And importantly, it supports the company’s mission of "changing the way people eat forever."

Looking Ahead

Following HelloFresh’s successful PoC, the company has now fully deployed Snowplow’s Customer Data Infrastructure (CDI) and is positioned to further advance its data capabilities. It is now in the process of exploring new innovative use cases to enhance customer experiences. 

Looking forward, HelloFresh plans to make full use of its AI-ready customer data to develop sophisticated personalization capabilities. The company is aiming to combine Snowplow’s granular behavioral data with machine learning. By doing so, it hopes to create highly tailored experiences across its digital touchpoints, resulting in improved customer satisfaction and loyalty—two key priorities in its business strategy.

The company is also exploring emerging AI use cases. This includes potential applications that use real-time customer data to provide contextual advice and recommendations, creating more intuitive and helpful customer interactions. 

Additionally, HelloFresh continues to refine its data governance practices. The company is focused on maintaining the highest standards of data quality and compliance as privacy regulations evolve. This ongoing commitment ensures the company can adapt to changing regulatory landscapes while maintaining customer trust.

HelloFresh continues to expand into new markets and verticals. With its new unified first-party data platform, the company has a scalable data foundation that can grow with the business. It can now deliver consistent data practices across its global operations. And crucially, it has a data platform that supports its mission through data-driven innovation. As David noted: 

"Data isn't merely a support function, it's embedded in our DNA."
David Castro Gavino, Global Vice President of Data, HelloFresh

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