— SCOPE
Across Tools:
CPS (Culinary Planning Service)
MPS (Menu Planning System)
CCM (Customer Content Manager)
HelloFresh’s recipe teams across 13 markets relied on spreadsheets and disconnected tools to manage increasingly complex recipe configurations.
I led the end-to-end design of a unified internal B2B platform that replaced spreadsheet-driven workflows with a single, scalable system for managing recipe variants. This work enabled fully customizable recipes at scale and supported approximately €35M in modeled customer value, while significantly reducing operational complexity and making daily workflows clearer and safer for global teams.
THE PROBLEM (And why it was bigger than it looked!)
Discover:
The status quo
- Recipe customization technically existed, but it was held together by manual work.
- To support variants, teams relied on spreadsheets, copied data between tools, and recreated recipes that already existed. Variants were not linked, visibility was low, and changes were risky. As customization scaled, these workarounds broke down, not because teams lacked discipline, but because the system lacked structure.
[“Before” workflow diagram showing spreadsheets + manual handoffs]
Mapping the Reality Behind Recipe Creation
Workshops &
Service Blueprints
I led cross-market workshops and mapped the end-to-end recipe journey using service blueprints. The goal was to understand where the system was actually breaking and why.
One pattern emerged immediately: most “errors” weren’t user mistakes – they were gaps in how the system represented recipes.
There was no backend logic defining relationships between base recipes and variants. No way to see what already existed. Markets increasingly relied on memory, tribal knowledge, and disconnected Google Sheets to know which recipes connected to what.
Teams weren’t failing. The architecture was.
[Running a workshop across all markets to align on current processes.]
Peeling another
layer of the onion
The reframe: It’s not about customization – it’s about relationships
Additionally, there was no system logic on the backend that defined these relationships, and markets increasingly created workarounds and relied on memory and disparate Google sheets (our most dreaded enemy in HelloFresh!).
Instead of designing “better customization features,” I reframed the challenge as a holistic system-design question: How might we enable our internal tools to understand recipes so that customization becomes accurate, visible, and scalable?
From Discovery Insights to System Decisions
Changing the System, Not Just the UI
Guided Variant
Recipe Creation
Before, creating a variant meant leaving the entity (the recipe itself) – referencing other spreadsheets, copying SKUs, and maintaining unlinked recipe records.
We moved variant creation directly into the recipe workflow. Teams can now create variants from a base (parent) recipe, define the customization type (swap / add / double), and perform ingredient changes inside the system — saving variants as linked entities rather than copies.
Result: Variants are created once, intentionally, and accurately, thereby eliminating duplication and hours of manual coordination. (20–30 hrs/month manual ops saved)
Clear Recipe Hierarchy
- Previously, base recipes, variants, and versions existed as isolated records, making it difficult to know what already existed or how options were related.
- We introduced an explicit recipe hierarchy (Recipe Tree):
- Base recipe → Variants → Planned versions
- This made relationships visible in the workflow. Teams can now see which variants already exist, how recipes relate across weeks, and what is live, planned, or unscheduled through a recipe tree.
- Result: Reduced duplication, faster menu planning, and stronger inputs for demand planning and forecasting
Decisive Change Management
Updating recipes with variants used to be risky. Teams couldn’t clearly see what differed between base and variant, or how changes would propagate.
We introduced guided change management. Teams can now compare base and variant recipes side by side, see exactly which ingredients are swapped.
Explicit update paths replace guesswork:
– Sync all: apply changes across linked variants
Result: Teams gained clarity, confidence, and agency, while operational risk dropped significantly.
Business Impact
- 100% of core recipes customizable
- 3–5 variants per recipe
- €34–35M CVA enabled (~250k in annual savings due to efficiency in operational planning)
- 20–30 hrs/month estimated saved per market
Product & User Impact
“Big shoutout to Enterprise UX for this work. These hierarchy visualizations look super sharp even from a ‘noob’ perspective :) Excited to see this power future work!”
- — Principal Product Manager (Active Journeys Alliance)
“…big round of applause from the DACH team to the successful 2in1 rollout of versioning 0.5 and change mgt. Having these means some of the biggest inefficiencies and lack of traceability in menu planning are a thing of the past.”
— Sr. Program Manager (Strategic Product Development, DACH)
Awards
- It’s Nice That
- AIGA
- Fonts In Use
- The Dieline
Contact
email@domain.com
000-000-000
Where the System Can Go From Here
What this
work enabled
With a unified recipe model now in place, this work will unlock several high-impact next steps:
- AI-assisted variant creation
- Automatically generating common variants (e.g. “swap to chicken,” “make it veggie”) based on structured recipe data.
- Automated recipe step adjustments
- Reducing manual editorial work when ingredients change, while keeping instructions accurate.
- Personalized defaults
- Surfacing the most relevant variant by default based on customer preferences and past behavior.
- Seasonality-based variant families
- Allowing recipes to adapt intelligently to ingredient availability and regional context.
This project intentionally focused on building the foundation, enabling future personalization without adding operational complexity.