From payment to plate: How PayPal’s orchestration helps HelloFresh optimize subscriptions

​​​HelloFresh’s mission is to “change the way people eat forever.” They accomplish this with their flexible and customizable meal kits. HelloFresh simplifies food preparation of nutritious, delicious meals through customizable subscriptions. With a customer-focused approach, they've taken meal prep from effortful to easy.

In 201​1​, HelloFresh began with a simple vision - to bring out inner chefs while minimizing food waste. ​In 2023 alone​, HelloFresh delivered more than a billion nutritious meals across eighteen markets.

From offering ready-to-eat options to expanding plant-based meal choices, HelloFresh keeps evolving to meet changing customer needs. Emina Zahirovic, Associate Director of Global Payments at HelloFresh, discussed payments, processing, and parallels between the two companies.

Success metrics

• 3% incremental increase in approval rates as a result of PayPal Braintree’s Optimization Suite.¹

The opportunity

HelloFresh wanted to enhance the customer experience.

The meal kit industry has seen rapid growth amidst fierce competition, macroeconomic factors, and supply chain disruptions. For HelloFresh, continuing to be a market leader means diversifying and innovating their product offerings while also optimizing their subscription base.

To increase customer retention and support their global scale, HelloFresh ​requires​ a seamless, secure payment experience for customers. Critical to this is maintaining a reliable infrastructure across various payment partners.

The solution

HelloFresh finds a reliable and scalable payments platform in PayPal Braintree.

​​HelloFresh has collaborated with PayPal Braintree t​o address the scale and growth of its businesses while maintaining reliability and security​.​

Leveraging PayPal Braintree’s versatile payment infrastructure, HelloFresh implemented PSP-agnostic solutions tailored to its unique requirements. This unlocked solutions including the PayPal Braintree Vault as well as PayPal Braintree’s Optimization Suite of products like Network Tokens, Account Updater, and Retries.

The Braintree Vault provided HelloFresh with the security it needed across providers within a single, unified layer. Network Tokens and Account Updater maximized customer retention. This helped reduce involuntary churn, a critical metric for HelloFresh – and any subscription business.

Zahirovic ​highlighted the focus of​ the relationship between HelloFresh and PayPal: “​Our aim is​ to continuously optimize how we process payments.”

The impact

PayPal Braintree’s Optimization Suite helps HelloFresh increase approval rates.

Enhancing payment processes has never been more crucial for HelloFresh. As Zahirovic explained, “An increase in approval rates directly correlates to delivering more meal kits to more customers and therefore driving customer retention and lifetime value. Any improvements in our approval rates drive a material impact on our business.”

HelloFresh turned to PayPal Braintree’s Optimization Suite to drive an incremental 3% increase in approval rates.¹ This increase also helped to improve the lifetime value of their customers.

By securely vaulting acquirer-agnostic tokens, the Braintree Vault enabled HelloFresh to streamline operational efficiency across regions, providers, and lines of business.

“PayPal strives to revolutionize the digital commerce space, just as HelloFresh strives to do so in the food solutions space. By practicing similar values, PayPal is giving us the tools and support to further grow our business,” noted Zahirovic.

Both PayPal and HelloFresh are excited about building a happier, healthier future for consumers’ plates and payments. Ultimately, streamlining payment processing helps customers spend less time planning meals and more time enjoying them.

Learn how to drive conversion with PayPal’s end-to-end payments optimization.