— SCOPE
Across Tools:
CPS (Culinary Planning Service)
MPS (Menu Planning System)
CCM (Customer Content Manager)
— DESIGN TEAM
Lead Product / Service
Designer
+ Junior Visual Designer
HelloFresh customers want variety such as protein or ingredient swaps, not a single fixed option per recipe. Our task ahead was to scale it to support 13 markets, various internal tools, and operational constraints.
I led the UX and service design for a cross-tool revamp of how recipe customization is created, planned, and managed. By introducing a unified model for base recipes, variants, and versions, we turned customization from a fragile workaround into a scalable system capability, leading to:
3–5 variants per base recipe
100% customizable recipes
€34–35M CVA enabled
20–30 hrs/month manual ops saved
13 markets rollout
THE PROBLEM (And why it was bigger than it looked!)
Existing
Process
- 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: spreadsheets maintained variant recipes + very manual workarounds]
My Approach (Discovery & Alignment)
Service Blueprints
I led cross-market workshops and mapped the end-to-end recipe journey using service blueprints. This made one thing clear: most “errors” were not user mistakes, but gaps in how recipes and variants were represented in the system.
Running a workshop across all markets to align on current processes.
Finding & Defining (The Problem)
Peeling another
layer of the onion
The biggest problem was that recipe variants were treated as completely separate recipes. There was no real connection between a parent / base recipe, its variants (e.g. protein swaps) and their operational versions. (E.g. A Chicken Fried Rice recipe was not connected to a Tofu Fried Rice recipe in the system)
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!).
Strategy (Reframing The Problem)
Instead of designing “better customization features,” I reframed the challenge as a holistic system-design question: How should our internal tools understand recipes so that customization becomes accurate, visible, and scalable?
Four Guiding Principles
Define a shared recipe structure
Everyone works from the same recipe foundation instead of creating disconnected copies
Create one universal guided way to create variants
- No spreadsheets, no ambiguity
Make relationships visible to users
- Teams should not have to guess which recipes are connected
Let the system do the work
Data should flow automatically across tools
The Solution (What Changed)
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.
Apply changes across linked variants
Business Impact
- 100% of core recipes customizable
- 3–5 variants per recipe
- €34–35M CVA enabled
- 20–30 hrs/month 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
Looking Ahead (What’s next!)
Thinking Beyond
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.