“Creativity is thinking up new things. Innovation is doing new things.” – Theodore Levitt
Scott F., Associate Director of Culinary Innovation at HelloFresh
At the HelloFresh Culinary Innovation Lab, creativity and innovation come together to transform the way we cook and enjoy food. By experimenting, testing, and reimagining everyday meals, the lab is dedicated to crafting fresh and exciting concepts to keep our customers engaged and inspired.
Today, we’re thrilled to introduce Scott F., Associate Director of Culinary Innovation at HelloFresh, to learn more about the exciting work he and his teammates are doing at the lab!
Recent innovations at the lab include a made-from-scratch scallion pancake beef roll inspired by Taiwanese flavors, chicken shawarma served with homemade pita, and cheddar dill scones transformed into sandwiches.
Meet Scott: A Culinary Visionary at HelloFresh
Scott—who went to culinary school and also trained in fine dining—has studied business, entrepreneurship, and design and brings a unique skill set to the Culinary Innovation Lab.
Throughout his career, he’s worked in a variety of different environments, including nonprofits, restaurant groups, and meal kit companies. He’s also run and taught at a recreational cooking school.
Over the years, teaching cooking classes has given him deep insight into how people approach recipes, helping him combine creativity with data and business experience to make cooking accessible and enjoyable for HelloFresh customers.
At the Culinary Innovation Lab, Scott and the team maintain focus on their two main objectives: incubate new concepts on the product roadmap and experiment to drive week-to-week customer excitement while uncovering new insights for the business.
A Day in the Lab
There’s no typical day in the lab, as each day is dynamic and different. The team alternates between conceptual brainstorming for new recipes and techniques and hands-on testing in the kitchen. Scott describes the work as being organized into sprints—focused periods for idea generation, validation, and iteration. The team prioritizes experimentation, moving quickly from conceptualizing an idea to testing it out, learning from the results, and deciding whether it’s worth pursuing.
The innovative work that Scott and his team do is organized into sprints—focused periods for idea generation, validation, and iteration.
When identifying areas to focus on, they often start with a specific customer insight or need. Most of these ideas come directly from customer feedback gathered by our Consumer Insights Team through surveys, idea ranking, and even in-person customer brainstorming exercises done at the HelloFresh office.
The Culinary Lab team then forms a hypothesis of how they might address that insight or need, such as through a new meal type, tool, technique or cooking experience. Then, the experimentation in the lab begins, where they develop prototypes to validate the feasibility and refine the concept before sharing with customers.
Scott says the goal is to address customer pain points or uncover alternative ways customers are already solving problems outside of HelloFresh. At the same time, the team aims to introduce exciting and fresh ideas to keep long-term subscribers engaged and inspired by what’s new on the menu.
The Summer Campaign Series & Recipe Experimentation
This summer, Scott and his team launched a “camping and picnic series” to explore customer interest in outdoor-friendly meal options. The camping concept was inspired by feedback from customers who already used HelloFresh for car camping or grilling and appreciated the convenience of pre-portioned ingredients.
The team took it a step further by designing recipes optimized for outdoor cooking, whether camping or in the backyard. These meals required minimal tools, less cleanup, and instructions for cooking over a fire—something HelloFresh had never done before.
Scott and the team took bread-making to the next level with a ‘make-your-own focaccia’ recipe that doubles as a pizza.
More recently, Scott and the team became intrigued by the idea of bread making as an embedded technique in our recipes and did a “make-your-own focaccia” recipe that also doubled as a pizza. Other recent innovations include a made-from-scratch scallion pancake beef roll inspired by Taiwanese flavors, chicken shawarma served with homemade pita, and cheddar dill scones transformed into sandwiches.
These recipes allow the team to experiment with new techniques while offering customers a fresh take on weeknight dinners, expanding the possibilities of what HelloFresh can deliver. Given that the bread-based recipes were a fair bit longer than usual (60-120 min), we also see this as an opportunity to be more of a “project” meal that customers may cook on a weekend as well.
The Future of Innovation
As the culinary innovation team looks to the future, there are some exciting launches planned for the new year. One of the highlights is a new line of mocktails designed for Dry January, featuring Poppi Soda—adding a creative beverage option to complement HelloFresh’s food offerings.
The team is also working on larger product launches and continuing to test new concepts, similar to the campfire-inspired meals. Throughout it all, customer feedback plays a crucial role in reshaping their approach to recipe development. The team gathers insights not just through larger-scale evaluations, but also from real-time feedback every week. Customers rate and comment on each recipe, which provides valuable information and helps the team understand what works and what doesn’t.
Our new line of mocktails designed for Dry January feature Poppi Soda.
For example, one of the team’s recent recipe experiments involved a spinach and pistachio pesto paired with chicken and spaghetti. While some customers loved the unique twist, others were disappointed by the absence of basil in the pesto. The takeaway, Scott says, was that the technique worked, but the feedback revealed a gap in the messaging around the flavor profile and the customer expectations.
“So much of the way people understand and think about food has to do with language,” Scott adds, “and it has to do with their own experience of that language in relation to food.”
As Scott and the team continue to explore, test, and refine their process, the journey at the Culinary Innovation Lab is constantly evolving and each idea has the potential to grow and blossom into something meaningful on the menu.
As the team builds their “idea engine,” as Scott calls it, they’re focused on keeping the constant flow of creativity alive, using the right filters to guide them forward. And at the heart of the Culinary Innovation Lab is the commitment to finding new ways to scale that creativity and bring fresh experiences to the table—one idea at a time.
Check out their latest culinary innovations on the menu here.
