How HelloFresh should run Meta ads.
Meal kits churn hard, so the whole game is first-box cost against how long the cohort stays. Heavy discounting only works if week three sticks.
Analysis built with paid.social, the ad-planning tool from Jonas Sluijs, former Meta growth leadIt's a cohort game, not a ROAS game. HelloFresh acquires with a heavy first-box discount, so the first order almost always loses money on purpose. Whether that's smart depends entirely on retention: if a cohort keeps ordering past the third box, the payback lands; if it churns in week two, the discount just bought a freebie. So you optimise to the first box, but you manage to cohort payback, and you refresh creative constantly because meal-kit fatigue is real.
The under-used lever is reactivation. Meal-kit customers pause and lapse constantly, and winning them back costs a fraction of a cold acquisition. A serious HelloFresh account runs two engines side by side: broad cold acquisition on the discount offer, and an always-on reactivation campaign to everyone who has churned.
Brand-led here. With only a few plans, there's no catalogue to lean on, so creative does the work. Two angles carry cold acquisition; refresh them constantly.
How we built this plan
We modelled the economics from public meal-kit benchmarks for box price, retention, and churn, plus HelloFresh's stated focus on customer value. The derived numbers are estimates, not HelloFresh's data, meant to show what a churn-heavy subscription plan looks like and what "good" is.