HelloFresh reported increased revenue and decreased losses in its earnings report today — pushing it further ahead of its U.S. competitor Blue Apron. Yesterday, HelloFresh also announced it acquired organic meal kit company Green Chef, expanding its dietary options and its threat to competitors.
HelloFresh’s sales are growing five times faster than Blue Apron’s
It also has way more customers.
Rani Molla was a senior correspondent at Vox and has been focusing her reporting on the future of work. She has covered business and technology for more than a decade — often in charts — including at Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal.
The Berlin-based company, which went public last November, saw its revenue top $1 billion in 2017, a 52 percent increase from 2016. Meanwhile, Blue Apron’s revenue grew 11 percent to $881 million.
Neither company is profitable, but HelloFresh’s net loss is smaller and shrinking. Blue Apron’s is growing.
HelloFresh’s customer base also grew to 1.5 million globally, making it much bigger than Blue Apron, whose customer base shrank 15 percent to 746,000 due to lowered marketing spending. However, HelloFresh includes customers who’ve received free boxes toward its customer total while Blue Apron only counts paying customers, so the comparison isn’t quite fair.
Blue Apron has struggled since it went public last summer, thanks to warehousing issues and competition from Amazon as well as brick-and-mortar grocery stores. Investors have responded in kind. Its stock is currently trading at about $2 a share, which is 80 percent below its opening IPO price.
HelloFresh, meanwhile, is up 4 percent today, 43 percent above its first day of trading.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
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