It’s tough to discern whether Richter, the co-founder and
CEO of HelloFresh—known for delivering the ingredients for
Instagram-perfect home-cooked meals like Argentinian-Style
Cod With Almond Herb Chimichurri and Chicken Thighs in
Kimchi Sauce With Asian Pear Slaw, and now the No. 1 meal-kit
company on the planet—actually derives any gustatory pleasure
from food. “We’re in the business of creating meal solutions for
di;erent meal occasions,” he explains, perhaps thinking I’d never
before heard of the concept called dinner.
Richter doesn’t seem to much care for the social aspect of
food, either. He’s not a fan of work co;ees or breakfast meetings
or this lunch, for instance. He prefers to put his head down and
work. “Leading by example,” he says with a German-accented lilt,
explaining how he’s managed to become the king of a brutally
competitive industry that at its peak had more than 100 contend-
ers. “Being the one that is very structured, very motivated, very
hands-on, doing everything that needs to get done.”
It was likely all these qualities that originally caught the atten-
tion of Oliver Samwer back in 2011. The German internet mogul
was always prowling for future CEOs. He had a type—MBAs from
elite European business schools who had done a few years at
investment banks or consulting firms, often with a serious
athletic streak—and collected them. Richter checked all three
boxes: business school at the prestigious London School of
Economics and WHU-Otto Beisheim School of Management in
Vallendar, Germany (Samwer’s alma mater); a year at Goldman
Sachs; a stint as a semiprofessional soccer player in Austria. As
one of Samwer’s former executives puts it: “You could have
chosen a hundred other guys—same look, same profile.”
Around the time Samwer decided to activate Richter on his
latest venture—then under the name Jade 1314—the almost-
billionaire was feeling restless. During the prior four years, he
and his brothers had amassed a fortune by copycatting overseas
startups, building and selling European versions of eBay, You-
Tube, Groupon, Facebook, and more. Rocket Internet, their
four-year-old flagship company, was a veritable clone incubator,
having sta;ed and funded more than two dozen startups. (See
“Trials of a Clone Factory,” page 83.) Yet even as his net worth
swelled, Samwer was no longer content to just plunder market
share from the innovators. He wanted to own entire categories.
“The time for blitzkrieg must be chosen wisely,” he wrote in
an email to managers of Home24, one of his clone companies that
sold furniture online. “Each country tells me with blood when it
is time. I am ready—anytime!” E-commerce was a winner-take-all
game, Samwer believed, and time was running out. Dominant
players were the only survivors; losers were forgotten. Rocket
entrepreneurs must be willing to “die to win.” “If i see that you
are wasting my money, that you are not german detail oriented,
that you are not fast, that you are not aggressive, that you are
not data driven … then i get angry and do like in russia” (sic), he
wrote, referencing his decision to strip Home24 managers there
of their pay and equity. (After the email went public, Samwer
apologized “to anyone who might have been o;ended” by its
language or tone.)
A new category Samwer wanted to test—and dominate—
was meal kits. A Swedish startup called Linas Matkasse sold
preportioned groceries with corresponding recipe cards that
arrived weekly through the mail. In Sweden, the concept had
proved extremely popular, and the company was on track
to generate $45 million in revenue in its fourth year in business. Once Richter was on board with the Linas Matkasse
copycat, he assembled his team, recruiting Thomas Griesel
and Jessica Nilsson to be co-founders. It was the trio’s job to
find out if meal kits would take o; in the rest of the world—
and, if so, to seize that before anyone else did.
Jade 1314—eventually named HelloFresh—launched from
Berlin in October 2011. The meal-kit venture was a small bet
for Rocket. But for Richter, it was an opportunity to fulfill a
vision of himself he’d nurtured since college: He wanted to be
a startup founder. Over the years, he’d made attempts—there
was his idea for an Airbnb-type site geared to university stu-
dents, and the plan for a campus-based food-delivery service.
More recently, he and Griesel, also an MBA and a champion
miler and steeplechase runner, had been pitching a daily
fantasy-sports betting site for professional soccer. But they’d
been unable to persuade investors to buy into their dreams.
Now Richter had a backer, and better yet, a potentially
massive opportunity. If meal kits turned out to be more than
a Scandinavian anomaly, they’d be able to disrupt one of the
biggest industries in the world: the grocery supply chain.
Richter and the Swedes weren’t alone in this ambition for
long. HelloFresh’s two most formidable competitors, Blue Apron
and Plated, emerged within months of its launch, and soon the
industry had grown into a full-blown battle royale. Over the next
six years, venture capitalists dumped more than $1 billion into
funding over 100 competing startups that o;ered some variation
of the following: For between $60 and $180 a week, consumers
could receive at their doorstep a deconstructed meal in a card-
80 ; INC. ; JULY/AUGUST 2018 ; ; ; ; ; ;
ominik Richter is not a chef, a gourmand, or a food
snob. It’s a Tuesday in March, and the 32-year-old in a
hoodie has chosen to lunch at a kale-and-juice joint
that could easily make you think you’re in Los Angeles,
except it’s in Berlin. But rather than opine over the
lactose-free yogurt dressing on the Super Green Detox
salad, Richter is stabbing his pumpkin seeds and lettuce
as if to establish dominance over the leafy prey.
