As part of our mission to change the way people eat, we are constantly finding ways to help you balance your carbon footprint. HelloFresh commits to offsetting all the direct CO₂ emissions caused by our internal operations and offices, plus all emissions from corporate travel and delivery to our customers. We do this by investing in green initiatives via our partner Planetly. By completely offsetting the carbon footprint of our deliveries, we support you in making green choices and boost environmentally friendly projects throughout the world.

The Kasigau Corridor region of Kenya is the main migration corridor for local wildlife, including several endangered animal species, such as zebras, cheetahs and lions. In a project to offset our carbon emissions, HelloFresh supports sustainable farming and forestry in this region through the United Nations REDD+ (a project that pursues long-term strategies for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation). This project protects over 200,000 hectares of dryland forest, which is home to over 11,000 wild elephants and prevents 1.6 millions tonnes of CO₂ from being released into the atmosphere each year. A key element of the project is providing jobs and training for local farmers to promote sustainable agriculture, generate increased crop yields, and improve the livelihoods of the farmers into the future.

In Kathmandu, Nepal, getting rid of waste from the city’s vegetable markets is a big challenge. As one of our carbon offset projects, HelloFresh has been supporting a bio-composting operation that turns green waste into organic compost. Through this project, 50 tonnes of organic vegetable waste is collected each week from local markets that would otherwise end up in landfill. Following the success of this project, a larger and partly mechanized composting plant was also built nearby in Saibu. Along with the reduction in methane emissions, this project improves air quality for the community and provides high-quality compost for farmers to cultivate their fields more sustainably.

HelloFresh invests in various carbon offsetting initiatives, including large-scale renewable energy solutions in Turkey and China, and a methane capture project in the Netherlands. Three state-of-the-art hydroelectric turbines provide low-cost clean energy in Turkey, while the Gansu wind project in China powers 134 wind turbines and supports long-term job opportunities in renewable energy.

In the Netherlands, we offset our CO₂ emissions by supporting a VCS-certified (Verified Carbon Standard) project that captures methane emitted from farms. When soil can no longer absorb the nitrogen from disposed manure, the manure is instead used to generate renewable electricity, which also reduces methane emissions in the atmosphere.

To make sure your meal kit deliveries are carbon-neutral to your doorstep, we’ve teamed up with the climate action experts at Planetly. They build software for intelligent carbon management to help us analyze our total direct carbon emissions wherever HelloFresh is active (excl. the USA), and match us with local and global green initiatives like those noted above. We only work with certified initiatives that have been carefully selected by Planetly to ensure that the projects we support create a real impact to prevent climate change. Each project is closely aligned with the meal kit model, which is why we focus on the agricultural, forestry, and green energy industries. Planetly also supports us in further reducing our carbon footprint, for example, by switching to green electricity in Germany.