01 · HelloFresh · 2025
Building the System Behind €35M in Recipe Personalisation
Leading the systems and service design of HelloFresh’s global assortment platform to scale recipe customisation across 13 markets.
Overview
From spreadsheet chaos to a system enabling €35M in personalisation value.
I led the end-to-end design of a global recipe-management system across 13 markets, combining user research, service design, systems thinking, workflow modelling, product strategy, and implementation partnership.
CPS · Culinary Planning Service
MPS · Menu Planning System
CCM · Customer Content Manager
I led the work end to end: researching workflows across 13 markets, modelling recipe relationships and change rules, defining the core experience, and partnering with product and engineering through implementation and handoff.
The work turned recipe variants from disconnected copies into explicit, maintainable relationships. This made customisable recipes possible at scale.
The problem
Customisation existed, but manual work held it together.
Teams copied data between tools and recreated recipes that already existed. Variants were not linked, visibility was low, and every change introduced risk. As customisation scaled, these workarounds broke down because the system lacked structure.
Before Recipe variants were maintained in spreadsheets, with relationships and updates coordinated through manual handoffs.
Discovery
Mapping the reality behind recipe creation.
I led cross-market workshops and mapped the end-to-end recipe journey using service blueprints. One pattern emerged immediately: most “errors” were not user mistakes. They came from gaps in how the system represented recipes.
Workshop synthesis mapped the recipe journey and surfaced dependencies that the existing tools did not make visible.
Base recipes, variants, and planned versions.
What is shared, inherited, or intentionally different.
Which updates propagate and which remain local.
Markets, tools, and operational handoffs.
Base recipes and variants are not visibly connected, forcing teams to rely on memory or external documentation.
Make recipe relationships explicit through a clear hierarchy view.
- Fewer duplicate variants
- Fewer steps to identify related recipes
Changes must be manually applied across multiple related recipes, making updates slow and error-prone.
Support controlled change propagation, so teams apply a change once.
- Less time spent updating substitutions
- Fewer errors in steps or ingredients
The problem was not a missing customisation feature. The underlying system could not represent recipe relationships, inheritance rules, or downstream change clearly enough to support customisation at scale.
System design
Changing the system, not just the UI.
Create once. Keep every version connected.
Variant creation moved into the recipe workflow. A base recipe, its variants, and every planned version now share an explicit hierarchy instead of existing as disconnected copies.
20–30 hours of manual operations saved per market each month, with less duplication and stronger planning inputs.What changed Relationships that previously lived in spreadsheets and team knowledge became visible inside the product.
Make downstream impact visible before committing a change.
Teams can compare a base recipe with its variants, choose exactly which changes should propagate, and review the affected versions before committing an update.
Clearer decisions, greater agency, and lower operational risk.Before → after Manual spreadsheet coordination became a deliberate, reviewable product workflow.
Align
Established a shared model across 13 markets.
Define
Documented hierarchy, propagation, and exception behaviour.
Validate
Refined workflows with users and cross-functional stakeholders.
Deliver
Partnered through feasibility, implementation reviews, and handoff.
Impact
A scalable foundation for recipe personalisation.
By defining relationships and change behaviour at the system level, the product could scale customisation without multiplying disconnected workflows.
“These hierarchy visualizations look super sharp, even from a ‘noob’ perspective. Excited to see this power future work!”Principal Product Manager
“Some of the biggest inefficiencies and lack of traceability in menu planning are a thing of the past.”Senior Program Manager, DACH
What’s next
Where the system can go from here.
With a unified recipe model in place, the foundation can support more personalisation without adding operational complexity.
AI-assisted variant creation
Generate common variants from structured recipe data.
Automated step adjustments
Keep instructions accurate when ingredients change.
Personalized defaults
Surface relevant variants from customer preferences.
Seasonal variant families
Adapt recipes to availability and regional context.
Live product
Creating a new recipe variant.
See the variant creation workflow in the live product.