Overview
- The world’s leading meal kit company
- Active in 14 countries
- 600+ million meals delivered in 2020
Challenge
- Users exploiting promotional offers
- Ineffective and inefficient manual review process
- Need for a dynamic solution for various regional requirements
Solution
- Quick and easy implementation
- Market-specific strategies
- 12 customized machine learning models tailored to specific business needs
Results
- More accurately and effectively surface and stop promo fraud
- Consistently saving time, money, and resources
- Reallocating resources continuously drives business growth
Take this article with you
Overview
HelloFresh: The world’s leading meal kit company
HelloFresh is the world’s leading meal kit company, providing more than 600 million meals to 5.3 million households worldwide, in 14 countries and across 3 continents, in 2020. The company provides households with everything they need to prepare quality, delicious, home-cooked meals that require no planning, shopping, or hassle. Customers are supplied with every ingredient needed for thousands of HelloFresh recipes—all planned, sourced, and delivered to customers’ doorsteps. HelloFresh is dedicated to changing the way people eat, helping customers save money, access high-quality meals, reduce food waste, and take the stress out of meal time.
Challenge
Users exploit promotional offers, hurting HelloFresh’s bottom line
Promotional offers are an important part of HelloFresh’s business, helping to attract customers in new markets and incentivize them to try the meal kit service. The flip side to offering such generous promos is that they can be exploited.
The HelloFresh Risk Management team initially started tackling these challenges internally through manual review processes in spreadsheets, but quickly found that they didn’t have the breadth of data they needed to effectively detect which customers were exploiting their system. The team decided it was crucial to seek out a more effective and efficient solution on the market instead of building their own capabilities—and set out to find the best tool out there for their needs.
HelloFresh knew the exact criteria they were looking for in a fraud prevention solution—a flexible model that could adapt to each of their market’s unique needs, responsive and knowledgeable customer support, and an adjustable pricing model. After extensive research, HelloFresh chose to partner with Sift over the competition due to Sift’s unrivaled machine learning customization, the ability to increase or reduce thresholds depending on business needs, and hearing first-hand from other Sift customers how helpful the customer support was for them.
Solution
Rolling out 12 customized machine learning models
The implementation process was quick and simple, taking only a week and requiring minimal code. Sift helped HelloFresh to confirm whether two people with the same address are part of the same household and trying to take advantage of promo offers—and block or unblock accordingly.
Together, HelloFresh and Sift deployed 12 custom machine learning models to accommodate each market’s needs. With these customizable models, HelloFresh can easily personalize the solution to their markets.
HelloFresh has developed a global policy that can adapt country by country to fit local market needs, utilizing the global Risk Management team as well as local teams’ expertise. For example, the team can customize each region’s model based on the country’s unique mailing address systems, making it easier to verify households and customers who are trying to trick the system and get free boxes of HelloFresh.

“Working with Sift has been a positive experience. Sift has a great tool, and it takes the least amount of time and effort. Customization is important to us, and Sift is really great with that.”
Results
Reducing promo abuse saves HelloFresh time, money, and resources
Implementing Sift’s custom machine learning models was a huge success for HelloFresh. They were able to not only achieve 90%+ score precision in the U.S. and reduce promo abuse by 95%, but save the business time, money, and resources.
By turning to a more automated solution with Sift’s Digital Trust & Safety Suite, the Risk Management team lowered their operational costs by spending less time on tedious manual reviews. All of this saved time, money, and resources meant that the HelloFresh team could reallocate their time and resources to other important projects within the company, improving business efficiency.

“Sift is open to feedback, which is great in a partnership. The team is extremely proactive and our partnership has worked very well for us.”