HelloFresh hit by sales slump as people lose appetite for meal kits
HelloFresh has reported a sharp decline in sales as the struggling food delivery company battles falling demand after the pandemic-era meal kit boom.The German company was forced to make 900 UK job cuts last year with the closure of a delivery site in Nuneaton, and the demand for meal kits tumbled as revenue fell by more than 11% during 2025.Sales slumped “against various uncertainties in the macroeconomic environment and a deliberate effort to target a smaller yet more profitable number of customers”, it said.HelloFresh and competitors such as Gousto and Mindful Chef experienced rapid growth during the Covid lockdowns when people were told to stay at home, and at one point it was projecting revenues of €10bn (£8.6bn) by 2025.
However, the market value of the company has collapsed dramatically in recent years, and turnover came in at €6.8bn last year.The Berlin-based company’s share price has plummeted 93% since its 2021 peak as consumers turned away from convenience meals amid cost of living pressures.It fell 8% in early trading on Wednesday.HelloFresh has responded with a savings drive in 2024, which led to job cuts and the closure of delivery centres in the UK and elsewhere in Europe.
The company had 19,000 employees at the end of last year, down from almost 21,800 the previous year.It also pulled out of Spain and Italy, saying: “Those markets do not currently offer a clear path to the scale and sustainable profitability.”Total orders slumped 12% last year compared with 2024 as the number of meals it delivered tumbled by more than 100m.HelloFresh said it expects a further fall in revenue of up to 6% in 2026, after manufacturing problems in the US caused it to shed customers in the country.The chief executive, Dominik Richter, said: “Over the past year, we have seen consumer behaviour shifting decisively toward ‘eating real food’ … The debate is no longer simply about convenience, it is about the quality of what is convenient.
“Customers raise the bar constantly – and so must we,”HelloFresh suffered an even sharper fall in revenues in the US, its biggest market, where it said manufacturing bottlenecks and “meal quality issues negatively affected customer retention” as sales fell by almost 17%,The company also partly blamed high interest rates and Donald Trump’s trade tariffs for making customers more cautious,
Teenage girls sue Musk’s xAI, accusing Grok tool of creating child sexual abuse material
A group of three teenage girls, two of whom are minors, filed a lawsuit on Monday against Elon Musk’s xAI artificial intelligence company alleging that its Grok image generator used photos of them to produce and distribute child sexual abuse material. The class-action lawsuit is the first filed by minors following Grok’s rampant generation of nonconsensual nude images earlier this year.“xAI chose to profit off the sexual predation of real people, including children, despite knowing full well the consequences of creating such a dangerous product,” Vanessa Baehr-Jones, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, said in a statement.The suit, which was brought by three Tennessee teenagers but filed in California, where xAI is headquartered, details how the girls discovered that nude, AI-altered images of them were uploaded to a Discord server and shared online without their knowledge.After they alerted law enforcement to the images, according to the complaint, police arrested a suspect later that month and found child sexual abuse material (CSAM) on his phone that was allegedly produced using xAI’s image and video generation technology
Google scraps AI search feature that crowdsourced amateur medical advice
Google has dropped a new artificial intelligence search feature that gave users crowdsourced health advice from amateurs around the world.The company had said its launch of “What People Suggest”, which provided tips from strangers, showed “the potential of AI to transform health outcomes across the globe”.But Google has since quietly removed the feature, according to three people familiar with the decision.A Google spokesperson confirmed “What People Suggest” had been scrapped. The move came as part of a “broader simplification” of its search page and had nothing to do with the quality or safety of the new feature, the spokesperson said
Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra review: its huge screen blocks shoulder surfers from spying on you
Samsung’s latest Ultra superphone promises to keep shoulder surfers out of your business with a first-of-its-kind privacy display built into its huge 6.9in screen.The Guardian’s journalism is independent. We will earn a commission if you buy something through an affiliate link. Learn more
AI has exposed age-old problems with university coursework | Letter
The frustration many academics are expressing about artificial intelligence and critical thinking is understandable (‘I wish I could push ChatGPT off a cliff’: professors scramble to save critical thinking in an age of AI, 10 March). But from my experience working with students on academic writing, blaming AI risks masking a problem that universities have lived with for years.In my work with students, I have long seen the ways in which thinking can be outsourced when assessment allows it: essay mills, shared past papers, model essays passed between cohorts, or heavy reliance on tutors and friends to structure assignments. Artificial intelligence did not invent this behaviour. It has simply industrialised a shortcut that already existed
Trump administration reportedly set to be paid $10bn for brokering TikTok deal
Donald Trump’s administration is reportedly poised to be paid $10bn by investors as part of a deal to create a US-controlled version of TikTok.The $10bn, considered by the US government as a sort of transaction fee, will be paid by the administration-friendly investors who took control of TikTok’s US operations from its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, according to reporting that first appeared in the Wall Street Journal.The investors in the popular social media app include software company Oracle; MGX, an investment firm based in the United Arab Emirates; and private equity business Silver Lake. These entities, along with other backers, paid $2.5bn to the US treasury when the deal closed in January and are set to make further payments in the unusual arrangement until the total hits $10bn
Meta and Google trial: are infinite scroll and autoplay creating addicts?
It was as “easy as ABC”, claimed the lawyer prosecuting a landmark social media harm case against Meta and Google which heard closing arguments this week. The defendants were guilty, said Mark Lanier, of “addicting the brains of children”. Not true, replied the tech companies. Meta insisted providing young people with a “safer, healthier experience has always been core to our work”.Features such as autoplay videos, infinite scrolling and constantly chirruping alerts woven into the fabric of online platforms were central to the six-week trial in Los Angeles, which has been compared to the cases against tobacco companies in the 1990s
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