What you need to know:

• HelloFresh Australia has appointed Spark Foundry to its media account, understood to be worth $20m.
• The account includes its subsidiary brands YouFoodz, which HelloFresh acquired in July last year, and EveryPlate.
• Locally, the company has more than doubled headcount since the start of the pandemic, from 551 employees in 2020 to 1,196 in 2021.

HelloFresh Australia has appointed Publicis’ Spark Foundry as its media agency after a pitch for the account earlier this year.

Neither HelloFresh nor Spark Foundry would comment on the pitch, which industry observers suggest is worth in excess of $20 million.

The meal kit delivery service is a sizeable account because it comprises more than just the one brand. It includes lower-priced EveryPlate, as well as Brisbane-based YouFoodz, which HelloFresh acquired in July last year, boosting its revenues locally by $150 million and increasing customer numbers by 145,000.

“We have an ambition to become one of the largest direct-to-consumer food businesses in the world and ready-to-heat is an obvious extension for us as an adjacent category, leveraging a lot of capabilities,” HelloFresh Australia chief executive Tom Rutledge said at the time.

“The intention is to maintain YouFoodz as a stand alone company [but] we’d have a broader offer and a broader addressable market and ... have a bigger range of convenience focused meals.”

Formula One driver Daniel Ricciardo had featured in a YouFoodz campaign late last year to launch the company’s Fuel’d range – high protein meals aimed at male consumers.

At the time, media for the campaign was bought by GroupM’s AKQA Media, which was then folded into Essence from January this year. Essence will soon be wrapped in with MediaCom to become EssenceMediaCom. It’s understood AKQA Media has worked with YouFoodz on some campaigns and will finish up at the end of June.

HelloFresh has grown considerably over the past two years in Australia, rising from 551 employees in 2020 to 1,196 in 2021.

Globally, HelloFresh delivered one billion meals in 2021, had 8.5m active customers in the first quarter of 2021 and had 20,000 employees worldwide.

Its Germany-listed share price soared during 2020 and 2021, from €19 (A$28.69) in early 2020 to €94 (A$141.96) in mid-2021. It has since fallen back to €39 (A$58.90) as people around the world return to more normal shopping habits.