HelloFresh also wants to deliver itself in Germany

The end of the Liefery delivery service has been known since the end of last year, and customers such as HelloFresh have been looking for alternatives ever since. The cooking box provider is now likely to rely on its own fleet.

It has been known since November 2020 that the delivery company Liefery will be discontinued. This also has an impact on customers such as Asos, Zalando and HelloFresh. The latter has now announced that it will compensate for the loss with its own delivery service. In the Benelux countries, HelloFresh's cooking boxes are already delivered to customers by its own fleet of over 600 vehicles, while in Germany this was previously done by Liefery.

Jan Onneberg and Nils Fischer founded the start-up Liefery in 2014. Since 2017, the majority of Liefery, under the management of Fischer, has belonged to the Otto Group, which also includes the logistics company Hermes. So there is in-house competition. In 2020, the investor Advent bought 25 percent of Hermes, apparently wanting to revamp the company. Liefery was not profitable until recently, although demand due to coronavirus led to an increase in turnover of 40 to 50 percent.

A Hermes spokeswoman emphasized to Handelsblatt that the decisions should be seen separately, but that both serve the goal of "further developing Hermes' core business within a highly dynamic and competitive market environment."