“HelloFresh is transforming from a food company that does tech into a tech company that does food” – Your one and only CEO of HelloFresh

Apologies for yet another post on the subject. I just felt this was warranted. Look, I love the Hello Fresh subscription I have and I'm only invested in the wellbeing of that service for personal reasons, so I see AI-based enshittification as a bit of a threat to that.

The CEO proudly states this quote in speaking with a journalist at Forbes here

In the article they state they were able to take a three month pipeline and reduce it down to three hours. It's a pretty bold claim, coming from the stakeholder who decided to invest $70 million into their AI, you need to take such statements with a grain of salt. They essentially automated the asset pipeline behind recipes. As many have observed, recipe steps get AI photos, recipes are passed through LLMs for normalization and so on.

Initially, AI created drafts while human editors drove the process. As confidence grew, humans shifted to review mode. As Ronen puts it, they rode "shotgun in the car" rather than behind the wheel. Only after the system consistently matched or exceeded human output did HelloFresh fully deploy it.

But the Forbes article reveals a deeper issue: the fact the CEO wants to be more of a tech company than a food company.

You don't say stuff like this. Like this is just outright stupid PR and now my trust in the company has tanked knowing the captain of the ship probably has photos of Sam Altman and Mark Zuckerberg behind his desk on the wall instead of Jacques Pépin or Alton Brown.

I can't help but be reminded of the recent video circulating of the tech CEO rapping to a roomful of his subordinates, many of whom gleefully smile on.

You are not a tech company, Hello Fresh. You are not a flimsy algorithm or asset production pipeline. Those things are all in service to your primary purpose: recipe curation and automated grocery shopping.

Invest your humans in that. Humans need to be driving the car, not riding shotgun. They need to be involved in the tedious steps of translating recipes to cards because that is where you need to build expertise and artistry. Yes, you should continue to pay food photographers and yes it should take months because that's the constraints of craftsmanship. It should cost time and money, because it should be thoroughly vetted. AI can definitely be involved, only as a service to the artists who get more time to craft better quality output.

Or you can ignore this warning – and watch as customers suddenly see every fault, every mistake, every time they get annoyed by a step in a recipe, begin to question if this is because of AI, and begin to wonder what value they're getting out of the service.

When the groceries aren't even that good and the recipes aren't even being curated anymore, and customers start leaving in swathes, at least you'll be able to say now "we are a tech company" and maybe you can pivot into something stupid like "tinder for recipes."