Hungryroot

Last year, we launched our state of the art fulfillment center in Indianapolis, shown here. This year, we are launching two more, Dallas and Atlanta — big things to come at Hungryroot!

This picture is from 6 years ago when we launched a major NYC subway campaign blanking the city with Hungryroot ads showcasing our products. It failed miserably. The selling proposition wasn’t clear. People are used to buying food products at grocery stores. Why would they buy them from us online when we only offered 30 items? Our team was deflated, and I questioned the path forward. But six months later, we pivoted to what Hungryroot is today: a personalized food and wellness service, offering not just our own products, but other brands as well, along with recipes and recommendations for what to buy. Fast forward six years, and we’re profitably generating over $600M of annual revenue, helping hundreds of thousands of Americans feel better each day. Just a little reminder that from the darkest days come the brightest opportunities!

It’s been a wild start to the year at Hungryroot. We’re growing faster than ever: 116% new customer growth in January. We essentially pulled forward a full year, and we’re now delivering the order volume we expected to deliver in January 2026. Our excitement has been counterbalanced with a crazy amount of work. We hired over 100 new team members in our fulfillment and customer service centers. Amazingly, despite the growth and recent weather challenges, we are already close to returning to our operating quality metric goals (on-time, in-stocks, etc.). We saw a large increase in customer service tickets given new customers disproportionately reach out with questions or in need of help, and we still have work to catch up. We pride ourselves on having the best customer service, and it’s been painful to know that our recent response times haven’t lived up to that the past couple of weeks. On the flip side, it’s been incredible to see our long-standing customers support us. We’ve been working really hard, and their patience and understanding has been heartwarming and inspiring. I posted in our community page acknowledging the delays in our response times, and here are a few of their comments to our team. We thank them — and look forward to supporting them and all of our new customers for years to come. Our mission is to make it easy to eat healthy. We’re more bullish now than ever on the opportunity to do so.

This week, I had the honor of presenting at the ICR Conference, or as Jim Cramer calls it, the “Super Bowl of consumer conferences!” Here’s a summary of our talk: At Hungryroot, we’re using AI to build the most consumer-centric food and wellness company to ever exist. Food is deeply personal — it impacts how we feel on a daily basis, and the foods that make me feel my best are not the same as yours. In the future, the food industry will be more in tune with and able to service each customer’s individual needs. AI is the ticket to doing so. AI provides value to consumers when it replaces expensive tasks they’re ineffective or slow at, or simply dislike. Meal planning and food shopping are at the top of this list. The average American spends 7 hours a week meal planning and food shopping. Despite this, 70% of what we buy is the exact same as the week before. Despite that, 30% of what we buy we throw out. On top of this, 88% of Americans are metabolically unhealthy, and the food we’re eating is a primary cause. AI helps to solve these challenges. There are many different dimensions to identifying the foods that make us feel our best — our health, goals, lifestyle, tastes, and budget, to name a few. That’s why at Hungryroot we developed SmartCart, our cutting edge AI technology comprised of ten machine learning models and an operations research algorithm to recommend groceries and recipes tailored to each customer’s unique needs. Hungryroot customers trust SmartCart to pick their foods for their family, giving them hours back each week, reducing stress, improving their health, tripling the variety of food in their diet, and saving them money through less takeout and waste. SmartCart not only recommends foods to our customers, it also identifies product innovation opportunities. At Hungryroot, we’ve developed a unique line of clean ingredient sauces, our wildly popular healthy cookie doughs, smoothies, microwavable meals, and soon to come daily supergreens and protein powder. These are made possible through our unique model, data and insights. Food has a profound impact on our lives, and when we help people find the right foods, they feel better on a daily basis. That’s the purpose of our work at Hungryroot. Who else do you think is a consumer-centric food and wellness company? We are eager to learn from them!

Over 13 MILLION pounds of fruits and veggies were consumed by our Hungryroot Customers in 2024! We're consistently wowed by the Hungryroot community’s commitment to healthy eating — and our team’s dedication to getting the food they need to their doorsteps, every single week. Here’s to more healthy, delicious living in 2025!

Each year, we recognize our “Hungryroot Heroes” — team members who embody our values of being positive, proactive, and transparent, and who drive outsized impact for our customers and business. I’m proud to announce this year’s honorees: Erin Hoodlebrink (Inbound Supervisor), Chris Wittrock (Senior Planning Manager), Sonam Shah (Principal Product Manager), Joshua "jag" Ginsberg (Staff Software Engineer), Lindsey Baker (Photo and Video Manager), James Chen (Senior Backend Software Engineer), Vanessa Quandt (Grocery Category Lead), Jared Heller (Senior Manager, Fulfillment Systems and Analytics), Laura Cleary (Food Safety Manager), and Connie Ho (Senior FP&A Manager). Please join me in celebrating this year’s Hungryroot Heroes. Thank you for all you do!! I’m grateful to work with you

5 years ago, we pivoted Hungryroot from a struggling packaged food company into the personalized grocery service we are today. In many ways, we are still in the midst of that pivot. While revenue has grown 20x since then and we’re now generating meaningful annual profit, we’re still evolving the business at a foundational level. The difference is that each change we make now reaches hundreds of thousands of Americans. This simultaneously speeds up learning and slows down progress (as complexity is higher). It’s maintaining this nimble, always innovating mindset that I know is critical to our success, particularly in an ever changing AI-driven future. I look forward to the next 5 years!

3 takeaways from this week’s Goldman Sachs and last week’s Citi conferences: The AI “pyramid” is inverting. You can think of value creation in AI as shaped like a pyramid. Most of the value has gone into the bottom, infrastructure layer (chips, data centers) and middle, model layer (LLMs). Much less has gone to the top, application layer. On the “AI Powered Platforms” panel at the Citi conference, Ming S. Zhao Sirisha Kadamalakalva and I spoke about how this pyramid is likely to invert in the near future (as it did with the internet and cloud). Many people — credit image to Altimeter and Apoorv A. — now believe the most exciting opportunities of the next several years will be in the application layer with companies such as Harvey, Runway, and Hungryroot. Especially in the application layer, creating value from AI requires a systemic approach that combines model design with analytics, digital experience, operations, and brand. For example, at Hungryroot, the way our models are designed impacts the inventory we sell, and vice versa. Similarly, the way our UX is designed impacts the data we collect that feeds our models. Value is derived by integrating these various functions to optimize customer satisfaction and minimize operational costs and risk. On “The Role of AI in Transforming the Consumer Experience” panel at the Goldman Sachs conference, Wes Schroll and I spoke about how much of the focus to date in AI applications has been on cost cutting and enterprise solutions (e.g. streamlining customer service or back-office tasks). This is starting to change, and much of the future opportunity will be in consumer value creation (e.g. helping people eat healthier, be more creative, etc.). AI is moving so quickly that it can feel dizzying, and yet at the same time energizing. What changes are you observing or most excited about? Let’s discuss! Thank you Elinor L. Hoover and the Citi team, and Kay Lee and the GS team for including us.

I've learned a hard truth over the years: not all teams are created equal. Some teams are quick to shoot down new ideas, while others nod along without offering real feedback. But the truly great teams are the ones that embrace diverse perspectives and work together to elevate the best ideas. The Naysayers are the most common and harmful of teams. As a functional owner (e.g. product, design, marketing, etc.), it’s easy to feel that if you didn’t conceive of the idea yourself, it will reflect poorly on you or must be flawed (you’re supposed to be the expert!). But many times the best ideas come from a fresh perspective that can be challenging for functional owners to have themselves. The Yessirs are less common than The Naysayers, but equally dangerous because when you’re not the functional owner, there are key details you’re not aware of that must be factored in. The Collaborators represent what we must strive to cultivate. These teams welcome new ideas from outside of their function, and they recognize that there’s always something to learn from new ideas. They also know that the initial presentation of an idea is likely to have flaws, and so they work to better understand and improve the idea. I’ve worked with a lot of teams over my 20+ years as an entrepreneur. I’ve never felt more alignment with our teams at Hungryroot than I do today, and it’s because they’re a team of collaborators. There’s very little ego; the focus is on how we can collectively deliver the best possible experience for our customers. It makes the work more fun and allows us to be more innovative. Have you found ways of fostering this collaborative spirit? I’d love to hear from you.

Getting our customers' groceries from the fields to their doorstep takes hard work. On a recent visit to one of our friends and partners, Riverfresh Farms, we got a behind-the-scenes peek at how it all happens—and left more grateful and inspired than ever. Take a look!