Covid-19 has provided opportunities and challenges for fresh produce suppliers, with online retail and home delivery companies seeing a large increase in sales over the past year.

In a session titled New Routes to Market, HelloFresh's Tilman Eichstaedt said he believed the pandemic would have a lasting influence on the way we live and work.

Flexible working and the rise of food delivery have created more space in the market for home delivery companies. Eichstaedt explained how HelloFresh had had to significantly expand its provider network in the last year to cope with increased demand for Covid.

He said the company had tapped into latent capacity in the foodservice channel during the shutdown to enable it to quickly and successfully scale its supply chain to meet additional demand.

Innovative solutions

The focus going forward would be to make the supply chain as lean as possible from farm to fork, Eichstaedt noted.

"We try to be as regional and local as possible in our purchases: the fresher the product and the faster we can get it to our customers, the better it tastes," he said.

“We are always looking for innovative solutions to make our supply chain as efficient as possible. Our goal is to find partners to grow produce to our specifications and deliver it when we need it.”

Eichstaedt said the drive towards greater sustainability also offered many excellent opportunities for suppliers to differentiate their offering.

"We need to be able to convince the customer that this is a superior product, either because of the taste, because it requires less water to grow, or for any other reason," he said.

The session also heard from Dutch duo Ron Simpson and Julien Zaal, who are set to open several new branches of their avocado-themed restaurant, The Avocado Show, in the coming months.

The single-product restaurant continues its European expansion despite the challenges of Covid-19, having recently opened its last branch in Madrid.

“It has been quite an adventure to open up in these challenging times in different cultures and countries, and we have been through a lot together in the last 10 months to get to where we are today: finally open,” Zaal said.