A Day In The Life Of The HelloFresh Culinary Team

Ever wondered how your HelloFresh recipes are created? Chef Mimi shares the inside scoop…

(From left to right: Mimi, Andre, Jesse, Lizzy)

The culinary team consists of Andre, Lizzy, Jesse and I. We all have varying degrees of experience in the food world – from working in restaurants, cookery schools, catering and private cheffing. We are a very close team of pretty strong characters, which helps (or doesn’t help?!) when we are ripping apart each other’s recipes in feedback sessions! Thankfully, despite the odd disagreement about whether something needs more lime/cheese/mango chutney, we really love working together. As we are cooking in the kitchen together most days, we generally talk a lot during that time as well (whilst obviously working extremely hard at the same time!) which makes for a fab team dynamic.

Andre Lizzie and I are all HelloFresh veterans having been here for 3, 2 and 4 years respectively, whereas Jesse is a little newer having been here for just under a year. Jesse, however, has made a big impact on the team with her innovative exciting (and slightly more healthy than mine!) recipes.

A lot of people ask if we just float around cooking all day, and yes? We do a LOT of cooking (although less of the floating) but we also spend hours looking through recipe data and feedback… It’s not all fun and games!

A few years ago the HelloFresh recipe creation process used to be a simple matter of deciding to cook something (usually on your own in your house in your pyjamas), buying the ingredients, cooking, tasting, writing it and sending it off to the menu planning team. Luckily, we have moved on from this process and use our customer feedback to direct how we will create the recipes. We have also graduated from cooking in our houses to a slightly strange tiny flat in Holborn, to now our lovely development kitchen in our Shoreditch office (think ‘MasterChef’…). It’s been a real journey!

Here’s a little insight on what we get up to on a daily basis:

9am: Customer feedback!

Every week we discuss recipe feedback from the recipe survey sent to customers the previous week! In this meeting, we discuss any improvements that need to be made to the recipes (the customers are always right!).

Our customers are our number 1 priority of course and we look through ALL the feedback we get in our weekly recipe survey feedback meeting. This is how we look when our recipes score badly, so just remember please score all recipes 4/4 😉!

11am: Recipe brainstorm!

This can be anything to sitting in our recipe book library, reading food magazines and cookbooks, to going for lunch at a restaurant, to going to a market buying some ingredients and having a play around with them in the kitchen just to get the creative juices flowing!

1pm: Cooking time!

Once we have costed up and cooked our recipes, we then discuss and critique them as a group, rarely does a recipe not have any changes made to it! Each recipe gets cooked 4-5 times (and sometimes more) before going through to be planned in a menu and sadly not all recipes make it through the process, but this is because we want to make sure all the recipes we put through are our best work and will be loved by our wonderful customers!

3.30pm: Washing up and clearing up!

Probably the least fun and glam time of the day… Jesse has to get her marigolds on for this, she has very delicate hands, and Andre will do anything to avoid this part of the day!

4pm: Recipe writing time

(with a nice cup of tea and occasionally a cake or yum yum)! We write out the recipes that we’ve just cooked and these recipes then go through our testing process.

6pm: Hometime!

(Usually off home to cook our one of that weeks’ HelloFresh recipes!)

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