Inside HelloFresh’s misleading cold calling campaign: When ‘no’ means ‘yes’

Friday, 17 October 2025

ANALYSIS: “Arguably, in the eyes of HelloFresh, ‘yes’ meant yes, ‘maybe’ meant yes, and ‘no’ mean[t] yes.”

Judge Kathryn Maxwell’s summing up in her $845,000 sentencing of home delivery meal kit company HelloFresh for unfair trading this week was measured, but did not pull any punches.

High cancellation rates were a feature of the HelloFresh operating model, she said.

So were big money, cold calling campaigns to “reactivate” ex-customers’ subscriptions.

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It was a model in which part of the German multi-national’s margins charged to loyal customers to get HelloFresh boxes dropped on their doorsteps was used to fund discount vouchers to ex-customers to try to woo them back.

Maxwell’s summing up revealed many features of HelloFresh’s cold calling strategy, including both the legally sound, and the legally unsound and ethically untenable.

Some of it provides lessons for consumers about how cold calling and sales campaigns are plotted, and executed.

The scale was vast, and no, they didn’t really want ‘feedback’

Maxwell found HelloFresh had been reactivating ex-customers’ accounts and charging them subscription fees without permission after misleading cold calls made from contact centres in Croatia, the Philippines and Australia.

In the 18-month charge period spanning 2022 and 2023, more than 300,000 of these cold calls were answered and 77,939 ex-customer accounts were reactivated.

Call centre staffers told cold call recipients that HelloFresh was seeking feedback, and in thanks the ex-customer would get discounts on future HelloFresh orders.

“The premise of the call was to collect feedback with a discount offer put forward as a token of appreciation for that feedback,” Maxwell said.

But HelloFresh didn’t really care about the feedback.

Feedback was “only used anecdotally” by HelloFresh, Maxwell said.

“The calls were performed by the reactivation team, rather than, for example, a customer care team,” she said.

“HelloFresh's outbound reactivation training documents indicate that the true purpose of the feedback component of the call was reactivation.”

HelloFresh used ambiguity as a tool

The feedback ruse was part of an ambiguity play from HelloFresh.

Call centre staffers had a bullet point script. They went “off script” according to HelloFresh, however, the company admitted the script was inadequate.

Maxwell found the script and training material had elements of designed ambiguity.

“Reactivation is explicitly mentioned only once, and at the very end of the script,” she said.

“In the ‘purpose’ column, agents are told to inform the customer, we will apply the discount to their account, not to inform them that their account has been reactivated, or that they will be charged,” she said.

Reactivation was only mentioned as “a hypothetical”, in the case of the ex-customer deciding to use the vouchers, but that was not true.

And, Maxwell said: “The script further sets out that customers won't be charged today, re-emphasising the idea that consumers aren't signed up to be reactivated as opposed to having a voucher applied to their account.

“The result of this ambiguity is seen in the call recordings,” she said.

Cold callers are commission agents

In the case of the Zagreb, Sydney and Manilla call centres, staffers had targets. They were expected to make 20 calls and achieve two reactivations per hour.

That’s three minutes per call, explaining why the cold calls played in court by the commission involved call centre staff speaking quite rapidly.

Maxwell said 17% to 53% of their pay was dependent on bonuses for reactivations.

Maxwell recalled the infamous Youi case, in which agents for the South African insurer, which pulled out of New Zealand after the scandal, issued policies to people who only called up for a quote.

Careful design, poor supervision

HelloFresh’s reactivation call script was developed by HelloFresh’s growth management team, Maxwell said.

It was based on pre-existing Hello Fresh Group’s global framework, which was then “optimised for the New Zealand market”.

But the cold calling centres were poorly supervised, Maxwell found.

HelloFresh was slow to act on hundreds of complaints.

Maxwell spoke of HelloFresh’s being careless of its legal duties not to mislead people.

The harm is real

Maxwell said one ex-customer had her account reactivated despite saying her mortgage payments had gone up, and she couldn’t afford the subscription.

“Customers who did not realise and did not want their subscriptions to be reactivated, were charged between $55 and $163 at a time without their express consent,” Maxwell said.

“Some customers that did not manage to cancel before an order was placed highlighted that the money taken by HelloFresh was their food budget for the week.”

HelloFresh sent 85 of the reactivated subscription customers, who did not pay, to debt collectors.

Making it hard to cancel

HelloFresh reactivated accounts without permission after the cold calls, but there was no phone number or email on its website, or in its app, so people could re-cancel the subscriptions they never wanted.

There was a four-step process which meant having to “talk” with a chatbot.

HelloFresh denied this was a “subscription trap”, but it did concede it was intentional, and it was inconvenient.

Your complaint matters

The commission’s case followed 31 complaints from members of the public.

That was the tip of the iceberg, however. Many angry people do not complain.

Internally, HelloFresh had 424 complaints relating to its reactivation calls between January 2023 and July 2023.

But of the nearly 78,000 reactivations in that time, nearly half cancelled immediately after they were notified by text by HelloFresh that their subscription had been reactivated, or after having just one meal box delivered.