Developing recipes for success

This month I had the opportunity to interview HelloFresh's Head of Culinary, Andre Dupin and Senior Strategic HR Business Partner, Vicki Jones. I spoke with them about how HelloFresh's relationship with the Mencap Training Academy is developing and about the progress of our learner, Yulia, who is currently in a work experience placement in the culinary team. We had a really interesting conversation and I really enjoyed learning about what HelloFresh does and how they are supporting our learners. I hope you enjoy reading about it too!

Andre: HelloFresh creates meal kits that people can order via the HelloFresh website or app. Our customers receive a box with all the ingredients for their meals for the week so they can then cook them at home. We create the recipes, recipe cards and instruction with pictures that they can follow.

I'm the Head of Culinary at HelloFresh, which means I manage the team that creates all the recipes that go into both HelloFresh and Green Chef boxes. I also manage the ingredients team. All the ingredients that make it to our customer boxes come through our team for sampling and approval. 

Vicki: I'm the HR Business Partner at our head office in London. I partner with our senior leaders and support them with anything related to people. That could be strategy , engagement or celebrations! I've been working in London for just over a year now, but before that, I worked in one of our distribution centres, where I partnered with the Head of Production and the supported the teams there to get our HelloFresh boxes out to customers.

Vicki: We have a neurodiverse employee resource group (ERG) that celebrates and champions neurodivergent individuals at HelloFresh. A colleague in the group had worked with Mencap before. They recommended talking to some of your colleagues about your programmes, as they thought it would be a great opportunity for somebody to come and do a supported internship with us. 

London felt like the best location for us to set up the supported internship. It was close to the Mencap offices whereas our distribution centres are scattered across the country. One of the most exciting areas of our business, meanwhile, is our recipe development kitchens. That's where the magic happens! Being able to offer work experience in this area of the food industry felt like a great idea, and our culinary team were excited and on board to support!

Andre: When I saw the Mencap website and some of the work you do with other food businesses like us, I thought it would be a really good match for us. But we're actually very different to a lot of other food businesses. We aren't a commercial restaurant or pub. Our culinary team create and develop recipes for customers to cook at home, so it's not in a commercial setting where you're directly serving customers, it's almost office-based. That's why I got excited about working with the Mencap Training Academy - I thought we could run a placement that would enable whoever joined us to develop lots of different skills. I think our experience with Yulia, who's our supported intern this year, has proved that. She's been with us for a few months now and you can see how she's developing and fitting into the team. 

Andre: Yulia works in our development kitchen as a culinary assistant, helping to create the recipes we eventually send to our customers. Our immediate objective has been to get her not necessarily developing recipes on her own, but certainly participating within the process. 

We have multiple ways of testing and verifying our recipes to make sure that they work and that our customers will enjoy them, and Yulia is helping us to do this. Each week for the two days that she's with us, she will take maybe three or four recipes that we're thinking of sending out to customers , and she will cook them herself. She then gives us feedback as someone who doesn't have the same kind of culinary experience as the rest of our team. It provides a great opportunity to get feedback from someone who experiences the recipes a bit more like a customer might, and for us to potentially adjust our recipes to make them as customers friendly as possible. Ultimately that's our objective - to create meals that people can make at home easily, that taste good, and that don't generate huge amounts of washing up. 

Vicki: Mencap worked with us to organise an assessment day at the start of the year. We wanted the day to be a great introduction to HelloFresh and for the learners to come and have some fun, be themselves and cook some great food! We wanted to ensure HelloFresh was the right placement for them and that they would get a valuable experience from being with us. We got some really good feedback about the day and how the team had structured it, everyone seemed to have a lot of fun!

Yulia at her work station at HelloFresh HQ.

Andre: We had six people come in for the assessment day and we set up a cooking challenge fro them, creating a stir fry. It was great to give people the opportunity to cook some food, and I think we managed to create a nice environment which didn't feel too competitive or stressful or overwhelming. Everyone was just really focused on what they wanted in their stir fry - "I don't want any vegetables!" "Don't give me those vegetables." Then they all sat down and ate their meals as a group. It was nice for us to see, and it gave us the chance to meet the people who were interested in the placement and get a bit of an understanding of what made them tick. It gave us all the information that we needed to make a decision. 

Vicki: We worked quite closely with Mencap to prepare the assessment day and to establish criteria for the candidates for the placement. We were very keen that the learners who had applied had an interest in food, that they could learn in a kitchen environment and were comfortable using basic kitchen appliances. 

Andre: It also meant that when Yulia started in the placement, she'd already experienced the space and understood it and knew some people already. All those things really helped to smooth her entry into the business and helped her to get on with her job very, very quickly. 

Mencap Training Academy learners preparing their stir frys at the HelloFresh assessment day. 

Vicki: From my perspective it's shown us as an organisation how we can be more diverse with our recruitment and really expand on where and how we find talent in the future, as well as the support that we can put in place internally. 

We're still relatively new as a business in the UK and so we've struck to quite traditional routes and methods of recruitment. But I think this has really opened all our eyes to different possibilities moving forward, which is really exciting because we want to continue to be as diverse an employer as possible. I know the senior leaders in the business also feel this way. 

It's also supported us in adapted the way we train and communicate to our employees. Everybody is different and has different learning styles, and I think we now, having worked with Yulia, understand that adapting learning styles is crucial to getting the best out of our employees. 

Andre: Without being cheesy, I think it's seeing how Yulia has developed. The objective of the placement was about giving someone an opportunity to develop their skills and their confidence, and I think we've definitely seen that with Yulia. That's very rewarding for the whole team. We now understand what is possible and it's made us think differently as well. It's given other people in the team who have been working directly with Yulia day-to-day the opportunity to develop and adapt the ways they manage and communicate. I think the benefits are spreading the longer Yulia is here, and I think the impact is positive for her too. 

Vicki: I'm proud that as a business, we've been able to do this. To be able to support Yulia and the team to grow and develop, like Andre describes, has been really rewarding. As out business matures, we are now able to explore how we can support both the industry and future talent. I'm really hoping that moving forward we can do more of this kind of thing and spread knowledge about the food industry - that it's not all about traditional kitchens! There is so much more that goes into creating great recipes and if we can help shine a light on the industry we'll have done some good. 

Natalie Duo is a co-trainer at Mencap, delivering learning disability awareness training to employers. She is a graduate of one of our supported internship programmes, during which time she completed work experience with The Financial Times. She now continues to indulge her love of writing through regular interviews with our employer partners.