HelloFresh’s Epic Outcomes: How Operations Leaders Take Smart Risks to Innovate and Drive Productivity

Everyone wants epic outcomes, but few are willing to bet before it’s obvious. 

At their recent joint presentation, “Betting on the Future: Taking Smart Risks to Drive Innovation in Operations,” for the Women in Manufacturing Summit, Sheila Stafford, TeamSense’s Co-Founder and CEO, and Joanna Hicks, HelloFresh’s SVP of North America Fulfillment, shared their strategies for how companies can win big by placing the right bets.

Case in point? During the pandemic, HelloFresh partnered with TeamSense, a then-unknown startup, to revolutionize their attendance management operations. They’ve been rewarded for their early vision with an innovative, ongoing collaboration that’s proved its value to the company time and again.

In today’s era of agile fulfillment and frontline operations innovation, success depends on how quickly organizations can adapt to disruption, from labor shortages to supply chain delays. For operations leaders, smart risk-taking isn’t just a leadership trait, it’s a business necessity.

Let’s dive in to discover the lessons that you can learn from HelloFresh’s bet on TeamSense’s frontline productivity platform.

1) Move First, Learn Fast, and Co-Create

HelloFresh is the world’s leading meal kit provider, delivering approximately 1 billion meals annually. Business boomed during the pandemic-era lockdowns, as the company provided a convenient, contactless source of nutritious meals that appealed to families stuck at home. 

“Demand was huge — but so were the challenges,” says Hicks. 

One of their most significant challenges? Managing frontline employee attendance. “People were nervous about coming to work. We had more orders than people, more orders than hours in the day. We were turning customers away because we didn’t know who would show up for the next shift.”

Communication between managers and team members was sub-par. “We had a basic one-way text tool,” Hicks adds. “Fine for blasting messages, useless for two-way info. It wasn’t enough for a strained operation.”

Instead, employees left a message with a hotline when they weren’t able to make it to work. And that just meant more work for their managers: they often spent up to four hours a day on processing call-offs and manual data entry, sorting through around 300 voicemails each day.

Managers lacked visibility around attendance, and were wasting productive time tracking down the data. That also made it hard to plan production schedules, resulting in downtime and low efficiency.

HelloFresh knew there had to be a better way to manage attendance — they just needed the right partner to help them.

Betting big on a new player

Leadership understood that manual call-off processes and lack of real-time attendance visibility were costing valuable production time.

Enter TeamSense, with dedicated features for streamlining and automating attendance management, and easy, text-based absence reporting for employees. 

“HelloFresh found us via Google and asked for a pilot,” says Stafford. “I committed to a 30-day pilot, because we show results quickly.”

TeamSense launched their attendance tool at a single plant in the NY/NJ area. Two weeks in, the pilot was going so well that HelloFresh asked to add another site. At the end of the pilot they agreed to a national rollout. 

How long from the first meeting to full national deployment? 12 weeks. 

Co-creating an ideal solution

How were they able to launch and deploy so quickly? “The key is the right partner,” says Hicks.

“Sheila’s supply-chain background meant her team met us where we were. I’m also a ‘fail fast’ person. At the time we were doing about a million boxes a week across three sites. You can’t move that volume if you’re stuck in analysis paralysis. TeamSense worked better than what we had, so we went all in — and it’s been one of our best decisions.”

If HelloFresh had chosen an all-purpose solution like Workday, they’d be limited by the available features, and need to find their own workarounds — or simply accept that they can’t get everything they want in one tool. Selecting a specialized, agile vendor enabled the company to work directly with TeamSense’s founding team to build a custom use case that met their specific needs, with continual optimization based on HelloFresh’s feedback.

By partnering with an earlier-stage tech company, HelloFresh directly influenced TeamSense’s roadmap. Thanks to HelloFresh’s early input, TeamSense was able to prioritize:

• A custom export that feeds HelloFresh’s Snowflake data stack.
• Language support: after English and Spanish, their third language was Haitian Creole, a need that reflected HelloFresh’s distinct employee population. Today, TeamSense supports 30+ languages.
• Ongoing betas: TeamSense brings new features to HelloFresh early and asks, “Want to test this?”

“We’d grown on a hockey-stick curve and were still organizing,” says Hicks. “TeamSense met us where we were — larger vendors wouldn’t have.”

2) Set Goals, Track Results, and Translate to Dollars

When making the case for a new solution or partner, especially one your stakeholders may not be familiar with, it’s important to translate KPIs into real dollar value. 

For example, TeamSense’s solution can increase visibility around attendance, cut downtime, and measurably reduce absentee rates. But how does that translate into dollars saved or earned?

“It’s the language everyone — from plant managers to the CEO — speaks,” says Stafford. “Fundamentally, you impact a business by increasing revenue or decreasing cost.”

How downtime reduction = revenue preserved

Let’s look at reduced downtime as an example. 

Downtime reflects lost productivity: If the line isn’t running, your output comes to a halt. “When I was at GM over 20 years ago, downtime cost $10,000 per minute (one vehicle per minute),” says Stafford. 

For a solution like TeamSense that curbs downtime, you can quantify savings by measuring revenue from output preserved.

“Saved 500 minutes of annual downtime” sounds good. “Delivered $5,000,000 in impact” gets remembered.

3) Pick the Right Partner, Not the Biggest One

Stafford recounts a well-known business saying: “No one gets fired for buying IBM.” 

But the safe choice isn’t necessarily the right choice if you’re looking for outsized results. Instead of choosing a familiar name with an ill-fitting system, partnering with a smaller vendor with more to prove can pave the way for a highly collaborative strategy that has a greater impact on your business. For operations executives weighing technology investments, this underscores a growing trend in logistics and manufacturing software selection: smaller, specialized solutions that help you accomplish goals faster than disinterested conglomerates.

“Knowing that [HelloFresh is] betting on me,” says Stafford, “I want nothing more than their success. So when we're setting goals, their goals are our goals. When we're tracking those KPIs and translating them to dollars, we both have clarity on the impact that we've had, and can say, ‘This is working. Let's keep going and expanding from there.’”

By choosing a smaller vendor as a partner, you have the opportunity to be one of their most important customers, and shape their product roadmap in line with your business needs. Agility, trust, and partnership can trump the primary qualities of larger organizations, such as scale, tenure, and theater (“looking the part”). 

Don’t be afraid of choosing a vendor that doesn’t have a big-name case study — instead, become the case study, and you’ll be rewarded for your vision. In the years since selecting TeamSense to manage attendance, HelloFresh has continued to partner closely as a beta tester and super user, helping shape new capabilities across the platform. They are among the most frequent users of Communicate, which enables HelloFresh to instantly send automatically translated text messages to entire sites or targeted groups, and Employee Assistant, which uses AI to answer common employee questions automatically. Together, these innovations have further streamlined communication, reduced downtime and administrative burden, and improved the employee experience across HelloFresh’s fulfillment network.

Embrace Calculated Risks to Fuel Transformative Growth

Achieving truly epic outcomes in today's dynamic market requires a bold and strategic approach to risk-taking. Play it safe with conventional methods, and you’ll see incremental improvements at best — but embracing calculated risks can unlock transformative growth. 

Forging partnerships with smaller, agile businesses means that you can tailor solutions precisely to your unique needs, rather than forcing a one-size-fits-all approach. By proactively seeking out these innovative collaborators, you'll be able to pioneer new solutions that drive the metrics that matter to your business — resulting in greater efficiency, cost savings, and bottom-line growth.

By empowering plant managers, operations leaders, and frontline supervisors with agile, mobile-first tools like TeamSense, manufacturers can reduce downtime, improve shift coverage, and strengthen labor efficiency, all while building more resilient operations.

Ready for your own epic outcome? Book a demo of TeamSense.