HelloFresh fined $845,000 for reactivating subscriptions without permission

Thursday, 16 October 2025

Home delivery meal box company HelloFresh has been fined $845,000 at the District Court in Auckland for misleading conduct under the Fair Trading Act.

It had pleaded guilty to misleading shoppers in cold calls designed to reactivate the subscriptions of customers who had cancelled because they no longer wanted HelloFresh meal boxes delivered to their homes.

In the cold calls between February 2022 and July 2023, HelloFresh offered former customers vouchers off future orders, but did not tell them that accepting them would reactivate their subscriptions and restart weekly box deliveries. Many were shocked to find payments going from their accounts to HelloFresh they had not authorised.

Judge Kathryn Maxwell found cold callers hired by HelloFresh had misled some customers, and in some cases victims of unauthorised reactivations saw money deducted from their accounts which they had needed to buy their weekly groceries.

HelloFresh hired debt collectors to chase some reactivated account-holders for payments, Maxwell said.

Cold call centre agents were encouraged to be persistent and Maxwell said: “Arguably, in the eyes of HelloFresh, ‘yes’ meant yes, ‘maybe’ meant yes, and ‘no’ meant yes.”

The case was taken by the Commerce Commission, which was responding to complaints from shoppers.

Danielle Houghton, representing the commission, had argued for a starting point of a fine of $1.5m to $1.6m with discounts of 35% for previous good character, early guilty pleas and HelloFresh’s cooperation with investigators.

Houghton said the dishonest behaviour was significant in scale, with more than 300,000 of its 1.2 million cold calls answered by ex-customers, leading to 77,939 reactivations.

Counsel for HelloFresh, Peter Hunt, argued the starting point should be a fine of $900,000, and that there should be no “uplift” for HelloFresh’s global size, arguing HelloFresh in New Zealand was not a wealthy company.

HelloFresh is part of the multi-national German HelloFresh Group, with operations in 18 countries including Europe, the UK, Australia and the US.

Cold calls from call centres in Sydney, in Zagreb in Croatia, and in Manilla in the Philippines, were played in court.

In each call, the ex-customers were told HelloFresh was seeking customer feedback, but that was not the real intention of the calls, Maxwell found.

Customers were offered vouchers against future orders “in appreciation” for their previous custom, and in each call, they accepted them without committing to use them.

In none of the calls did the ex-customers authorise HelloFresh to levy any charges, and in one case the former customer specifically said they did not want their account reactivated.

One told a Philippines call centre staffer that she could not afford HelloFresh boxes any more.

Despite that, after each of the calls the accounts were reactivated.

“What the commission says is it is clear on any objective analysis that these customers did not agree to have their accounts reactivated,” Houghton said.There was inherent dishonesty in the reactivations.

HelloFresh blamed staff in the call centres it hired to run its reactivation campaign, but Houghton said HelloFresh’s training, scripting, and commission incentives, made the misleading behaviour predictable.

Up to 53% of call centre operator earnings came from commission for reactivating accounts, Houghton said.

Just under half of ex-customers whose accounts were reactivated, cancelled as soon as they realised what had happened, or after receiving one meal kit box.

But, Houghton said they then found themselves in a “subscription trap”, having to go through a complicated four-step online process with no phone number to call HelloFresh, or email to cancel through.

She called HelloFresh’s behaviour “highly careless, if not reckless”, but the commission did not believe that it had intended to behave dishonestly.

Hunt said there was no orchestrated campaign of dishonesty.

And, he said, after the cold calls terminated, ex-customers were immediately sent a text message saying their accounts had been reactivated, giving them a chance to cancel immediately.

But HelloFresh admitted there was not enough control over call centre staff, and some of them had gone “off script”.

Hunt said HelloFresh accepted the script was inadequate but denied there was any subscription trap.

No customer had been left out of pocket, Hunt said, but HelloFresh had put customers to inconvenience with its behaviour.

HelloFresh still made reactivation cold calls, but there was a new script for cold callers, auditing of cold calls, and it no longer used the Zagreb call centre, Hunt said.

Mirroring the behaviour of Jetstar directors, who flew to Auckland for its sentencing last month for misleading travellers over cancellation compensation, one of HelloFresh’s directors jetted in from Australia to sit at the back of the court to show contrition.

HelloFresh’s New Zealand financial statements for the 12 months to the end of 2023 show the company earned $145m in revenue in New Zealand, and a profit after tax of $2.4m.

But the company had suffered falling sales at the time it mislead ex-customers.

In 2022, the company’s revenue had been $211m, and its profit after tax had been $11m.