HelloFresh reviews

3.3

54% would recommend to a friend

(3,155 total reviews)
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Dominik S. Richter

54% approve of CEO

36% positive business outlook

HelloFresh has an employee rating of 3.3 out of 5 stars, based on 3,155 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have a good working experience there. The HelloFresh employee rating is in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) for employers within the Restaurantes y servicios de comidas industry (3.7 stars).

Reviews by job title

3K reviews
2.0
Sep 17, 2020

a start up who became a corporate

Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

+ generous employee discount on the product + multiple employee growth opportunities, either horizontal or vertical + trainings + good leadership and communication trainings, especially for first-time managers e.g. 1:1 sessions with a coach + unified performance review process with clear expectations + HR are doing an amazing job at training managers, listening to employees and supporting every one with their day-to-day. For example they have open hours to help non-German speaking employees with their administrative papers. + company parties twice a year + international company with many diverse nationalities represented + nice area in Prenzlauer Berg with plenty to eat + scholarships for female university students in an attempt to increase diversity + good kitchens in the office everywhere + Friday Beers + Geek Fridays where there's 1 hour presentation on various topics

Cons

- not enough diversity based on age and gender (almost no old people, and departments are clearly genred e.g. Marketing with mostly females and Tech with mostly males, top managers are mostly white males). No real effort is made to change that and there is no transparency on the promotion rates between genres - many directors and senior directors (sometimes even VPs) have been hired or promoted without respecting the performance criteria, leading to having incompetent people in place (mostly white european men). As a result, the VP or C-level don't trust them and micro-manage all the teams. Therefore there is no ownership nor freedom for the squad leads and the directors to lead their teams. The squad lead becomes an executor with no possibility to innovate and needing 4 hierarchy approvals before starting a project - the culture is unfriendly and overcontrolling: employees have to log their working time on Slack at all time, even when they are 5 minutes away. People don't say hi to each other even when they work together. Employees are 'gently reminded' to put their agenda public so that their manager can check what they do at all times and private chats are strongly discouraged. There is no solidarity and top managers are taking credit for what others do without rewarding their own teams. It's also very common to encounter aggressive emails/meetings where people are blamed and/or continuously interrupted. Many people are fired on the last day of their probation time without any heads-up, they are simply ask to pack their stuff at lunch time when every one is out. - overcommunication is one of the core values, so you can expect hundreds of emails in your inbox with little to no relevant information for you. - the office is a huge open space with 200 people. There is a lot of light and a lot of noise. Not enough meeting rooms and no privacy.

1.0
Mar 26, 2020

STAY AWAY

Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

SUPER relaxed environment. You do not have to do your job. Pay is really good.

Cons

Your career will die here and you will learn nothing. They have no sense of long term planning at all, and everything they do implement is counter intuitive. Leadership is absolutely clueless, and they put a bandaid on major issues instead of fixing them. The WMS systems implemented are 40% accurate at best, and the bureaucracy around trying to improve things, or move the needle forward is insane. I DO NOT RECOMMEND! Terrible place to advance.

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HelloFresh Response
5y
Thank you for taking the time to share your experience at the Newark Distribution Center with us .We have a number of formalized development programs that are available to managers in the distribution centers to ensure they are constantly growing and learning , including a training and development stipend to be used for development opportunities of your choice including subscriptions or conferences.We want employees to share ideas they have about making HelloFresh better, so we encourage you to provide constructive suggestions including suggestions about systems and processes that currently exist. We hope you will reach out to your local HR team to discuss what we can specifically do to ensure you are having a positive experience.
2.0
Dec 9, 2018

Heavily top-down culture gone toxic

Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

As with many big startups in Berlin, HelloFresh is a very international and diverse organization (with the exception of the senior leadership team.) Office is well located and surrounded by other interesting startups. If you don't need much structure, and don't really care about things like "mission", "values" and "purpose", you can learn a lot of practical stuff on the job and have opportunities to go up somewhat within the company. You will also likely be involved in interviewing potential hires and be able to learn from that. There are still a lot of competent people working there, although the turnover as of late has been immense.

Cons

HelloFresh, especially post-IPO, became completely obsessed with revenue at the expense of everything else. Senior leadership, with a mix of inexperience and arrogance, created a culture that has been pushing away a large number of long-standing employees, who started feeling their voice was irrelevant, and that their work wasn't really making a difference. I have personally left the company feeling that standing up for what you believe is best for the company, if it goes against the leadership's ideas, is a horrible idea. There is also an obsession with hiring, even if there are numerous cases of people with very little to do due to the lack of structured product management. And only increasing head count comes second to revenue. One of the consequences is an office that has for a long time been overcrowded and where working in the afternoon becomes impossible due to the lack of oxygen. In the summer, it literally becomes a sweat shop. A lot of people have said HR is ineffective, but the reality is that senior leadership's "command and control" mentality does not allow for much. Feedback, in its true form, is a foreign concept, despite claims of an "open" culture and performance review processes that are nothing but a lot of work because they still don't train people on how to do it properly. When those in charge are in fact not fans of feedback and do not take it for themselves, it is no wonder the culture gets screwed up at scale. Overall, the biggest issue of HelloFresh is hiring a lot of talent only for the ones at the top to have influence and decision making power. This strategy (or the lack of it) has certainly got the company to IPO (thanks to an impeccable job in marketing and operations) and become a billion dollar company but is now showing its long term effects: talent flocking away at a very fast clip, and the stock price going down hill at the same pace.

Viewing 76 - 78 of 3,155 Reviews

Glassdoor has 3,974 HelloFresh reviews submitted anonymously by HelloFresh employees. Read employee reviews and ratings on Glassdoor to decide if HelloFresh is right for you.