# HelloFresh "Upsize This Meal" — concept prototype

**Built by Corey Brown · July 2026**
**For:** HelloFresh, Senior Director of Product, Engagement (Toronto) application
**Live prototype:** https://coreywbrown.com/lab/hellofresh-upsize/
**Status:** Unlisted concept. Not affiliated with or endorsed by HelloFresh. Menu data reflects the live week of Jul 18 to 24, 2026; ingredient quantities and nutrition figures are representative and rounded for the demo.

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## Why this exists

The application is for a role that leads the Engagement tribe: deepening customers' relationships with the brand and, in plain terms, keeping people subscribed. So instead of telling them I think about retention, I picked a real, recurring customer complaint and built a fix for it. Show, don't tell.

## The problem

Across HelloFresh reviews and forums, one of the most consistent complaints from otherwise-happy subscribers is that **portions run small for bigger eaters**. It is a quiet churn driver: the recipes are good, but a household with two large appetites finishes a "2-person" meal still hungry, decides the plan is not sized for them, and cancels. The food is not the problem. The fit is.

## The insight

The fix was already latent in HelloFresh's own product. Every recipe page lists a **"Not included in your delivery"** section: the pantry staples they assume you have at home (oil, salt, pepper, often butter, egg, milk). Customers already trust and use that pattern. So the feature is not a new concept to teach; it is an extension of one they already follow.

## The solution

An **"Upsize this meal"** layer on the existing menu and recipe experience:

- A menu-level **"Upsizable for bigger appetites"** filter, so a big-appetite household can see the whole week through their own lens in one click.
- On each recipe, a **"Feeding bigger appetites?"** panel offering **Bulk Boosters**: one or two cheap, common ingredients that scale the meal up while holding the flavour, each flagged when it is something you likely already have at home.
- A **flex score** per recipe, and honest handling of dishes that do not fully scale. A portioned salmon fillet does not grow, so those recipes say "sides flex" and bulk the rice and veg around a fixed protein instead of pretending otherwise. The honesty is the point; it protects trust.
- A **live nutrition delta** so the heartier plate is transparent, not a mystery.

## Why it maps to the role

This is an engagement and retention play, not a recipe gimmick. It takes a specific churn reason ("not sized for us"), removes it with almost no operational cost (no new SKUs, no bigger boxes, no supply-chain change; it reuses existing recipe data and household staples), and turns a reason-to-leave into a reason-to-stay. That is the shape of work the Engagement tribe owns.

## How it was built

- A single self-contained HTML/CSS/JS file, no framework, no backend. The whole prototype is data-driven from one recipe array, so adding a meal is adding an object.
- Grounded in real research: I read the live weekly menu and real recipe pages to model the actual structure (ingredient list, the pantry section, the 2/4 serving toggle, per-serving nutrition, and the proportional step language HelloFresh already uses, like "add half the...").
- The Bulk Booster logic is archetype-based (grain skillet, rice bowl, stir-fry, meatball/patty, pasta), so it generalises across the menu rather than being hand-written per recipe. That is the part that would scale into their real recipe data.
- HelloFresh-styled but clearly labelled as an independent concept, using placeholder tiles rather than their copyrighted photography.

## What I would do next with real data

- Wire the boosters to actual recipe metadata and recompute the flex score and nutrition from source, rather than representative values.
- A/B test the panel against churn and reactivation for large-household cohorts; the hypothesis is a measurable lift in retention among subscribers who currently cite portion size.
- Explore a profile setting ("we are big eaters") that biases the whole menu, so the personalisation compounds over time.