Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the HelloFresh Capital Markets Day 2021 presentation. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the presentation and a 15-minute break, we will conduct a live question and answer session in two parts. Firstly, analysts who cover HelloFresh will be able to ask questions via the previously communicated conference call dial-in. In addition, all participants have the ability to submit their questions via the Ask a Question tab on the right-hand side of the player at any time during the presentation. A selection of those questions will be answered following the analyst Q&A, subject to time availability. I will now hand the call over to Co-founder and Group CEO of HelloFresh, Dominik S. Richter, to open the presentation.
Welcome, ladies and gentlemen. We're excited to host you today for our 2021 Capital Markets Day. My name is Dominik. I'm the co-founder and Group CEO of HelloFresh. We're big fans of the Capital Markets Day format as it gives us and you the opportunity to look beyond the noise of quarterly earnings and focus on the long-term opportunity that we're pursuing. The last 12 months have been an exceptional period for HelloFresh in all aspects, but even more so if you take into account that we only started the company from a blank sheet of paper here in Berlin a mere 10 years ago. It was November 2011 on a cold and rainy day in a cafe with free Wi-Fi.
When we started out, we wanted to make a difference and build something that we can be proud of, something that is economically successful, but with a big impact on society. What we definitely did not think is that at 10 years in, we'd be shipping over one billion meals to about seven million households all around the world, generating about EUR 5.9 billion in 2021 net revenue. We also could have never imagined to create over 17,000 jobs at HelloFresh directly and many thousands more at our partners that work exclusively for us, let alone that we'll become a net member of the DAX, Germany's most prominent stock market index. The last 10 years have been crazy intense and successful, but looking ahead, we still feel it's very early days for the company with huge growth one way and plenty of opportunities ahead of us.
Given our scale and the strong balance sheet and the many colleagues that we actually attracted over the last two years to the company, I'm looking very optimistic to the next 10 years and what we will be able to achieve over that time period. Speaking about great colleagues, I'm very proud to announce that we have a senior addition to our management team here at HelloFresh. Valeri Liborski will join us as our global CTO effective January first and work alongside the existing technology leadership team here at HelloFresh. He will take over a number of reporting lines from myself around engineering, data, product management, and design. He joins us from Amazon, where he has had a distinguished career and worked not only at AWS, but also in Amazon's consumer retail division after early stints in his career in leadership roles at Microsoft.
With the great growth plans we have in place for our technology group, I'm sure Valeri can be an awesome addition to our HelloFresh leadership team and really make a big difference. Over the next couple of hours, we'll be covering a lot of ground. I'll start off first by diving into our addressable market before Ed will share an update on our growth plans for the next few years. We would then like to spend some more time on the different capabilities and the infrastructure that we've put up over the last few years. Thomas, our co-founder and International CEO, Annie, our SVP Product, and Mike, the CEO of Factor, will provide insights into how we apply our capabilities to really generate sustainable competitive advantages, both against current as well as potential future competition.
Thomas Griesel will then cover our sustainability efforts and share with you what has been achieved already and the ambitious goals that we have set for HelloFresh in the future. Finally, Christian Gaertner will provide an update on our customer profitability and unit economics as those are really the drivers of our long-term profitability goals and then also translate what that means for our P&L, both in the near term as well as in the midterm. At the end of the agenda, we have set aside plenty of time to answer all of your questions. Analysts covering our stock have received a phone conference dial-in. All other participants can submit questions through the Ask a Question button at the top of the player on our ir website.
Our mission reads, "We change the way people eat forever." Simply by the sheer scale that we have achieved now, shipping one billion meals a year, whatever we do touches a massive amount of consumers and lives every week. With each of those 1 billion meals that we ship, we help consumers to save real money, we help them to eat better, to eat tastier, and with a greater variety, all while reducing their environmental footprint. It's really a privilege to be at the helm of a company that can stay true to its mission even 10 years into its lifetime. Our vision that we'll expand much more on later today is to become the world's leading food solutions group.
We want to make sure that our mission is accessible to an ever larger part of consumers globally and offer them a wide range of different food solutions in line with our mission. We see a ton of opportunity to expand beyond meal kits and over time become increasingly relevant for all sorts of different meal occasions for HelloFresh customers. Let me come to the first section of our agenda, our addressable market. I will start with the macro environment of the wider food market and then really zoom into what this means for HelloFresh today and in the future, and break down in detail how we envision to build out HelloFresh in the coming years. The food market is on the cusp of massive digital disruption.
Even after the massive acceleration that online food players have seen as a result of the pandemic in the past 18 months, only 5% of our overall food budgets are going towards online players. That trails more established categories such as apparel, furniture, or books by a wide margin. At the same time, those categories that are more established online are much smaller markets, and the food and beverage space in the U.S. alone is $1 trillion. Now, what that really implies is that as more and more percentage points of consumers' food budgets go to online players, it opens up dozens of billions of additional revenue potential in the online food space. Our conviction is that those players who have already set up their capabilities and the infrastructure will benefit in an outsized way from that offline to online shift.
Historically, consumers have made most of their decisions around allocating their food budgets based on proximity, but this is really changing rapidly. In a world where everything is just one click away, the decision-making of consumers will overwhelmingly be based on product fit and personalization rather than on access alone. Let me give you a very specific example from the U.S. The average physical grocery store targets around 30,000 consumers in a 16-mile radius. Proximity has really been the number one decision-making criterion in the last decades, and the vast majority of all of our food budgets have been going to offline grocery stores. If you compare that with the access that an e-commerce player with one online distribution center has in the U.S., you'll actually see the vast difference.
One online distribution center in the U.S. can serve all 330 million consumers in continental U.S. and serve a radius of 3 million miles. Now, what this also means is that grocery stores have to have an incredibly broad assortment with tens of thousands of SKUs, introducing substantial inefficiency and waste into their process because they're trying to be all things to all people. Whereas online players can really focus on providing the best solution and the best product fit to consumers because they're reaching consumers across a much wider radius. The decision-making criteria really move from proximity to product fit and take the location of a physical store out of the decision-making process. That's a very strong conviction that we at HelloFresh all share inside the company.
Despite the incredible growth that we have shown in the last 10 years, we're only touching a tiny portion of meals that our target households consume at home. We currently serve about 176 million households across 16 markets. Those households consume about 225 billion meals at home annually. At our run rate of shipping 1 billion meals per year, that implies less than 0.45% penetration of all meals consumed by our customers at home. As we continue to build out our suite of product offerings, we see a pretty big opportunity to expand the share of meals in a very meaningful way. Keep that statistic in mind. I'm gonna quote it again later on in the presentation.
Part of the reason why we only serve such a tiny fraction of overall meals for our consumers is the fact that we have been focused relentlessly on the dinner-at-home opportunity only over the past 10 years. We started with a very narrow proposition, and then over time, built out that proposition to become relevant to more and more consumers around the world. We did that because dinner is the largest subcategory of meals being consumed at home and where most spend is actually being allocated to. More than 50% of dinners are cooked and consumed at home in the U.S., and about two-thirds in our international markets. If you look at the food budgets that are allocated to consumption at home, then that's about 50% of U.S. consumers' food budgets and about 63% across our international markets.
It's a really big space, and a space in which we have focused to date, mostly on the dinner opportunity. We believe that the meals at home opportunity will continue to grow and that the current pandemic has triggered some fundamental changes to consumer behavior. Among these trends, I'd like to pick out three that we think will have a positive impact on HelloFresh and overall on the number of meals being consumed at home going forward. Firstly, with an increasing number of people working at least partially from home and more remote options than ever available, consumers' food budgets will naturally shift more towards at home consumption. Secondly, affordability of meal options is also something that remains as relevant as ever, and we have proven that our relative affordability has increased dramatically over the past couple of years compared to all other alternatives out there.
Thirdly, there's a huge trend of sustainability observable, not only for investors, but even more so for our consumers, and we have many proof points available that meal kits fare extremely well on that dimension compared to all alternatives. I will focus on the first two trends because Thomas will cover sustainability in its own section later on in the presentation. Both our internal as well as external studies have shown that in particular, our customer base expects to work more from home than ever before. Our customer base skews towards higher income households, often in settled circumstances, often parents and working in job, high-skilled jobs that lend themselves well to be done remotely.
A recent customer study that we have conducted only in October this year has shown that working from home is expected to remain prevalent for our customers even after the pandemic will have petered out. About 62% of our international customers expect to work from home in some form over the next 12 months, compared to about 57% of our U.S. consumers. Now, what's really interesting here is that customers in both clusters expect to work about the same amount from home one year from now than what they do currently, underscoring that this is not just something that is a pandemic-induced behavior, but something that is much more fundamental shift to a new normal way of working. With the onset of more remote work, consumers will obviously also consume more meals at home.
If they have traditionally eaten about half of their dinners at home and probably no lunches, with the onset of more remote options, they're gonna be eating more dinner opportunities at home, and they're also gonna eat more lunch options at home. That expands our total addressable market very directly as a result of more remote options available, especially in our customer group. The other trend that I wanna pick out, which provides a positive tailwind to HelloFresh, is affordability. When we started out, we tried to price our meals competitively against supermarkets, but we were operating subscale. As we have significantly lowered our cost base over time with more scale, we have reinvested a large chunk of these savings into improving our customer value proposition.
Not only did we add a lot more depth to our product offering, we also worked very hard to make our meals relatively more affordable against all other alternatives. Over that period, we have lowered our prices on multiple occasions, whereas all of the rest of the food world has actually kept up with inflationary trends. As a result, as of today, the affordability of our meals has improved by about 28 percentage points over direct competition or direct alternatives. Most of that has actually been coming in the last five years when we will really be able to take advantage of the much-improved scale that we have achieved over that time.
We believe affordability has been a major contributor to us being able to target an increasingly large share of consumers out there, because affordability is really one of the key drivers that drives the customer value proposition, and our customer value proposition as a result has just become vastly more advantageous to consumers worldwide. Now, before I turn my attention to the longer-term opportunity, I wanted to share one other really interesting statistic with you. As I have referenced previously, dinner at home is the largest part of a consumer's food budget. However, as of today, our consumers only allocate a small portion of their overall food budget to HelloFresh. What you see on that chart is the credit card spend in the U.S. across 165 different food retailers, specialist retailers, food delivery platforms, quick service restaurants, and digital native food brands.
In 2019, our customers spent about 7% of their budget across those 165 brands with HelloFresh. In 2021, our customers already spent about 14% of their overall food budget on those 165 brands on HelloFresh. There are two things that stand out to me with that statistic. First of all, we've been able to increase that share quite significantly. I think that's a direct consequence of a higher work from home regime, but also because we have broadened our set of product offerings quite enormously over that timeframe. Even more interesting though, we only just stand at 14%, and those 14% are across those 165 brands that are being tracked with credit card spend.
To me, that signals that there's a huge opportunity for us as we put more and more product offerings out there that are relevant to our consumers, that there's a big opportunity to further increase our share of wallet with our customer base, so that they cook not only week night dinners with us, but also consider HelloFresh for lunch, for weekend dinners, and potentially more week night dinners than we currently serve to them. This becomes clearer when you put it into the context of the broader macro environment. What we are observing at the moment is the unbundling of the traditional supermarket aisle at an accelerated pace. While offline supermarkets historically were really the aggregation layer, AKA the one-stop shop for all of your daily needs, this model becomes pretty antiquated in a world where consumers make choices predominantly based on product fit rather than on proximity.
Already today, we see a large array of specialist retailers and digital native brands across all traditional supermarket categories unbundling the supermarket aisle and capturing an increasing share of wallet. This applies not only to food or to food at home, but it does so and it does apply to beauty, to cleaning products, to pet food, as well as dry food. Now let's look what this actually implies for the food at home category. You see that there are a large number of specialists taking massive share of wallet from traditional grocers. Almost all of us have been started in the last decade only, and will only improve their offerings and their value proposition and most likely their affordability to consumers over time. While some of those categories might look niche to you, most of those categories are already today billion-dollar revenue opportunities.
Aside from the meal kit players and ready-to-eat players, where we obviously have a pretty big stake in, there are a variety of other services and specialist retailers eating into the at-home food budgets that were traditionally going to supermarkets. There are, for example, sustainable direct-to-consumer grocery retailers like Misfits or Imperfect Foods. There are meal replacement brands like Huel or yfood, and there are specialist retailers for ethically sourced meats such as ButcherBox or Crowd Cow, which have all been building out their businesses in the last couple of years only and really resonate with consumers. What all of us have in common is that what we do can meet consumer needs much better and in a much more personalized way than what existing grocers can do.
When proximity is not the dominant factor of consumer choice any longer, all of these models have huge advantages in actually carving out a market and providing huge value to their diverse customer segments, much more value than your local supermarket aisle can ever do. Another trend that we have observed with consumers is that they increasingly think about meal occasions rather than doing the weekly grocery run, which results in building up your own inventory at home with standard sizes that you then reuse over a couple of weeks and over time. The generation that has, you know, grown up with food delivery platforms, with meal kits, and with going to restaurants and quick service restaurants on an ongoing basis rarely thinks about stocking up their pantry with random items and then drawing down that inventory over time.
It's a really antiquated behavior from the past that was the direct consequence of the supermarket model that optimized for proximity rather than for product fit. In this new world where the supermarket aisle gets unbundled and consumers think increasingly about meal occasions rather than the weekly grocery shop, we aim to play a pivotal role. Our vision is to gradually offer a broader range of different food solutions to our consumers. We aim to allow them at some point in the future to freely choose and combine options from our meal kit assortment, our ready meal assortment, our HelloFresh Market, and potential future additional categories that we might want to offer, all in one order, very convenient for the end consumer.
A customer who might choose three meal kits and five items from our marketplace in one week might want to buy only one meal kit, two ready meals, and no items from the marketplace in the next week. This will give customers a lot more freedom in how they actually use HelloFresh, how they use our service. By designing desirable food solutions that not only appeal to week night dinners, but also to lunch, to breakfast or weekend dinners, we believe we can target a much larger share of meal occasions than what we currently do. This vision is still a few years out, but we're taking the right steps in that direction now by scaling up all of these offerings independently and standalone first, before we can eventually combine them.
As a result, we should be able to increase our share of meals from the low number of 0.45% of all meals that our customers consume with HelloFresh today to a multiple of that in five years' time. How we will get there over the next five years is what Ed will share in his update on our growth plans and our growth roadmaps in the next section. Executing against this vision will provide many benefits for HelloFresh, both for attracting new customers as well as retaining existing customers better while increasing our share of wallet with them. With a broader offering, we will become more relevant to customer segments, which at the moment don't find value in our HelloFresh products.
By allowing prospective customers to choose freely between all of the different food solutions that they might actually eat in any given week, our mass market appeal will increase significantly, resulting in lower customer acquisition costs. For existing customers, the main impact will be on increasing basket sizes as we provide them with more tailored solutions for different meal occasions. Whereas an existing customer today would pause her delivery in a week when she can't find the time to cook three meals from scratch, in the future, we think that customer, if we give her the choice to only consume one meal kit and fill up her baskets with other items from our marketplace or with some ready meals for lunch, will still continue to order and place an order for that week, dramatically increasing their frequency.
All in all, for existing customers, this should result in higher order rates, a higher AOV, and more contribution margin over the lifetime of a customer that we can capture. We have seen some of these trends already play out at a smaller scale in the past. As we have improved our product offering, our service levels, and the affordability of our products, we've been able to significantly increase the net revenue that we generate with our customers over their lifetime. For cohorts that we acquired four years ago, we retained about 20% of their initial spend on HelloFresh after two years or eight quarters. Much of that spend was then retained between year two and year four. That's already a level of net revenue retention that is far better than you'll find with most other e-commerce players out there.
All of the previously mentioned improvements to our customer proposition have yielded very meaningful improvements to our net revenue retention that we see for younger cohorts. For our most recent cohorts, we now retain almost double as much net revenue from them in the first two years than we did with older cohorts, trending at about 40% of their initial spend after two years. We project that from year two to year four, they will follow the same trend that older cohorts did in the past. There's a tremendous amount of value in the orders of our customers in the outer years of them spending money on HelloFresh. Very few customers stop deliveries once they have found product market fit and once they have found value in our product.
As we work on improving our relevance to more meal occasions by executing against that vision that I outlined, we think that especially loyal customers will find tremendous amount of value in our products and continue to spend more and more of their food budget with HelloFresh compared to some of the alternatives. That's really what makes us very excited about the vision that we have outlined, and that's why we think it will be very successful in the next 10 years for HelloFresh. With that, I'd like to hand over to my colleague, Ed, who will cover the growth roadmap and how it fits into the long-term vision that I tried to outline over the past couple of minutes.
Hi, I'm Ed, Chief Commercial Officer. I'm happy to share an update on our midterm objectives and initiatives we're working on to achieve these. Firstly, a recap on those objectives. At our last Capital Markets Day, we announced the ambition to reach more than EUR 10 billion in revenue, an EBITDA margin of 10%-15%, and strong free cash flow conversion. These metrics would place us in the very top tier of global e-commerce companies, both in terms of top and bottom-line performance. With our forecast to deliver almost EUR 6 billion revenue in 2021, we've already made a very positive step towards this goal. Last year, we guided to 20%-25% revenue growth and will significantly overachieve this. EBITDA in 2021 is forecast to be just a shade below our midterm target range.
A great achievement considering our investment in scaling the business this year. Even more encouraging than our strong financial performance in 2021 has been our progress across all parts of our growth strategy. That growth strategy has three key pillars. TAM penetration, TAM expansion, and monetization. Firstly, TAM penetration. As a reminder, we've historically defined our TAM as the top 40% of households in terms of income. Additionally, in markets where we have a value brand, that's the U.S., Australia, and Canada, we extend our targeting to an additional 20% of households, so covering the top 60% of households in these markets. This year, with the launch of Norway, Italy, and Japan, we've added a further 33 million households to our TAM, which is a 50% expansion of TAM in our international segment.
That takes our global TAM to 176 million households, and with 3.5 million active customers in each segment, we continue to operate at low single-digit penetration levels, 4.5% in our U.S. segment and just 3.5% in international. We have continually invested in expanding our audience over the years, meaning our TAM has been dynamic rather than static. Since 2015, for instance, TAM in our international segment has increased threefold, largely on the back of continued geographic expansion. In the same time period, TAM in our U.S. segment has grown by almost 60% as we introduced brands addressing new meal kit segments and expanded our targeting. This continued TAM expansion has resulted in our penetration growing much more slowly than our revenue growth.
As you can see from this chart, in the same time period that our group revenue has grown by 20 times, our penetration has grown only 5x-6x . Now, some of our markets clearly already operate above the group penetration level, and so I just want to emphasize how big the opportunity is to grow penetration by the group as a whole simply catching up to these markets. You can think of us having markets in three stages. Firstly, new markets. These have just launched, so right now that corresponds to Italy and Japan, which make up roughly 20% of our global TAM. Secondly, emerging markets, which make up around 60% of our global TAM. These markets include the U.S., an average 3%-5% household penetration. Finally, our most advanced markets, which average 7%-9% household penetration.
If you just quantify the opportunity for our new and emerging markets to simply catch up to the most advanced 20% of markets, we'd be adding almost 7 million active customers, so roughly doubling the size of our current active customer base. In addition, these advanced markets continue to show very healthy growth, which means the baseline for the newer markets to catch up to continues to develop. Two factors are especially relevant to continuing to grow penetration in these more advanced markets. Firstly, advancing our proposition and secondly, growing our share of reactivations. To start with, let's take a look at our core value proposition. When we think about what drives consumers to shift spend from traditional grocery shopping, there are three key elements, convenience, selection, and value.
Now first, when it comes to convenience, a key aspect is the time between a customer placing their order with HelloFresh and receiving their delivery. As you know, HelloFresh is a planned model, and the fact that there's some time between order and delivery means we're able to significantly reduce food waste and operational efficiency, passing these savings on to the consumer. That said, reducing the time from order to delivery is something we've seen can be very impactful to customer conversion rate and order rate. We've managed to incrementally reduce this over the last few years and plan to further bring it down in the future without sacrificing operational efficiency. Next, selection. As we expand the breadth of recipes we offer, we appeal to a much wider audience, resulting in strong conversion and retention uplift.
Currently, in our most advanced markets, we have roughly 35 recipes on the menu, but going forward, we'll continue to expand this to 50-100 options, as well as broadening the portfolio beyond meal kits, which I'll talk more about later. Finally, value. Just given our business model, we've always been able to offer attractive prices versus grocery stores. We've seen this evolve over the years as we've kept our prices broadly stable, while grocery stores tend to increase prices in line with inflation. Relative price positioning versus grocery stores is an important driver of our penetration, and the superior efficiency of our business model, as well as increasing operating leverage with scale, means that over the longer term, we can pass more of those benefits on to consumers becoming even more attractive in relative terms.
These improvements in convenience, selection, and value will continue to drive strong penetration growth even in our most advanced markets. The second key driver of increasing penetration in more advanced markets is reactivations. In these markets, we benefit from a large pool of former customers who we can reengage. Reactivations tend to be easier to convert than customers who haven't previously used HelloFresh, and so also require less marketing spend. Since customer retention is in line with new customers, overall ROI and paybacks are significantly better. In our longest-standing markets, we already see more than 1/3 of conversions coming from reactivations. While this temporarily dipped during the pandemic, with new customer volumes as a whole ramping up significantly, going forward, we expect the share of reactivations to continue to grow with 40%-50% of conversions midterm coming from reactivations in these markets.
Share will grow naturally as a result of having a higher base of former customers, as well as our portfolio as a whole becoming more mature. On top of this, we see plenty of ways to grow the likelihood of reactivating a given customer by improving performance of our marketing and CRM campaigns and as we advance our product offering. In summary, when it comes to penetration, despite our huge growth, we still operate at low single digit penetration levels, given our large TAM and continual investments in TAM expansion. We can drive substantial penetration growth by catching up newer markets to advanced markets. Even in those advanced markets, we're confident we can drive higher penetration by improving product and service levels and growing reactivations. Next, I'll move on to the second pillar of our growth strategy, which is TAM expansion.
Our TAM expansion strategy focuses on unlocking new customer segments where we can leverage the strong capabilities we've built across our core business over the last 10 years. There are three core dimensions by which we plan to unlock new customer segments, geographic expansion to new segments with distinct meal kit brands, and new verticals where we apply our capabilities to adjacent business models. First, a recap on our TAM expansion activities over the last few years. Here you can see the scale of our investment in new segments since 2018 with seven new geographies, three new brands, and two new verticals. Now, these investments are already having a very meaningful impact on our growth, collectively driving 25% of our total group revenue as of Q3 this year.
That's an especially impressive number when you consider that our group business has grown by 5x in that period. That means the new businesses now generate more revenue than our total group revenue in 2018 and have grown significantly faster than the group as a whole. We're very proud of our recent track record in establishing new segments that can meaningfully impact our growth trajectory. Going into each of these segments in turn, the first area is geographic expansion, which has historically been the most important driver of TAM expansion for HelloFresh. We're now live in 17 markets and have consistently added one to two new markets per year. This year, we added three with Norway, Italy, and Japan.
In 2022, we plan to launch our core HelloFresh brand in at least 2 new geographies, and we'll continue to expand our new brands internationally, launching Green Chef and Factor in one additional market each. I want to highlight two recent geographic launches that we're particularly excited about, and that's Italy and Japan. Here you can see pictures of the first HelloFresh boxes being packed in these markets after our launches over the last few weeks. As you know, Italy and Japan are really big markets which will add meaningfully to our TAM. In these markets, we've already reached coverage of roughly 80% of the population and will continue to expand this going forwards. Both of these markets represent the first step in exciting, large, new territories. Italy is our first market in Southern Europe, and Japan is our first Asian market.
They both tick the boxes we look for when expanding to new markets with strong e-commerce penetration and really good income profiles. Now that said, these markets also have quite distinct food cultures, so the first phase of our expansion will be focused on tailoring our product to meet the needs of local consumers. We're confident that if we get that bit right, then these markets can offer huge potential. Another big TAM expansion opportunity, which is still in very early stages, is our recent investment into the Ready-to-Eat space, which we've entered through acquisitions of Factor in the U.S. and Youfoodz in Australia. We see the customer segment as distinct to our meal kit customer base, skewing more towards male customers, single households, and those who are less engaged in cooking. We believe this segment will contribute significantly to our future growth for two main reasons.
First, the ready-to-eat market as a whole will grow significantly in the future, benefiting from strong tailwinds from increasing importance of convenience and health. Second, the capabilities needed to be successful selling meal kits direct to consumer are extremely similar to those needed to perform well in the ready-to-eat space. The market itself is already really large, with more than EUR 160 billion spent on ready-to-eat products globally. For context, that's about twice the size of the global health club market and 10x-15x the size of the global microwave oven market. The ready-to-eat food segment will be one of the biggest beneficiaries as consumers transition to more convenient and healthy product options. Currently, only a very small fraction of this market is online. In our view, an online proposition can be fundamentally superior.
An online player can offer much better variety and product fit. Rather than the narrow range of fixed ready meals you'd find in the grocery store, our brands Factor and Youfoodz offer 50-100 menu items that change each week and cater to specific customer needs or dietary goals. As meals are prepared and shipped directly to customers' homes, they arrive with much better freshness and improved shelf life. The home delivery membership model offers a much more convenient way to fill up your fridge with fresh, healthy meals each week. That's especially important as working from home becomes more prevalent. Over time, it's very much our expectation that more and more of this large TAM will transition online.
In order to capture this opportunity, we plan to not only grow within the U.S. and Australia, but also expand our international footprint further over the next few years. In 2022, we will enter one additional HelloFresh geography under the Factor brand. With this continued growth investment, we expect that our Ready-to-Eat segment will become a EUR 1 billion+ revenue vertical in its own right in the next few years. I think our early success here is also a great indication of our ability to extend our capabilities to adjacent segments, which we anticipate becoming a bigger part of our TAM expansion strategy in the future. The third and final pillar of our growth strategy is monetization. We've historically generated most of our revenue from weeknight dinners, and we think that weeknight dinners are a very unique occasion in the consumer food landscape.
Now, given how important the dinnertime ritual is to families' day-to-day lives, weeknight dinners are a high anxiety meal occasion. Couples often ask each other many hours in advance what's for dinner tonight, and the same definitely isn't true for breakfast, for instance. Weeknight dinners are also one of the most routine and habitual meal occasions which families are consistently at home for, unlike lunch or weekend dinners, for example. This high anxiety means the consumer is actively engaged in seeking out better approaches, and the high routine means that if you can offer a customer a better approach, you can really forge a long-standing relationship with that consumer. If you combine these two points, if you solve weeknight dinners, you have the perfect entry point to getting consumer attention and starting to shift more of their broader household food spend.
As HelloFresh has become more and more known for offering a superior solution for weeknight dinners, we now see significant opportunities to use our platform to be relevant for a broader range of meal occasions, whether that's weekend dinners, lunches, breakfasts, or snacks. That's why we launched HelloFresh Market to cover a much broader range of weekly mealtime needs. Market offers customers a one-stop shop for all meal occasions, along with curated grocery products. These new products can be ordered on top of the weekly HelloFresh dinner order in a few clicks at very attractive prices. To design the product range, we started from the customer and worked backwards and found that customers gravitate towards mealtime solutions rather than grocery basics.
Customers see HelloFresh as a trusted partner to their weekly meal planning, and as a result, our top-selling products aren't milk, bread, eggs, bananas like you see in a typical grocery store, but rather quick prep lunches, prepared meals, and curated grocery bundles. With these products, we're adding value to the customer in a completely differentiated way, whether that be through giving the customer a great recipe, offering a more convenient product format, or suggesting delicious pairing options. Given our weekly order rhythm, the products that perform best tend to be fresh items which customers plan to consume in the next few days. That's an advantage given that we have a short direct-to-consumer supply chain, which means we can send products at peak freshness and don't have products sitting on shelves for multiple days on end.
In 2021, we focused on really developing the proposition in a couple of pilot regions, which were our Benelux markets and our U.S. business. Benelux is the most advanced in terms of product portfolio, having scaled from 10 add-on products pre HelloFresh Market to now more than 400. So far, we've seen really strong customer engagement in the expanded range, with a trebling of uptake from 10% to 30% in the most recent quarter. That's even more pronounced amongst high-loyalty customers, with uptake averaging 40% for this audience. Despite the strong results so far, we still see ourselves as really early on in the journey of optimizing the HelloFresh Market offering and have an exciting roadmap in place for 2022. We'll take our market offering to more of our customer base, expanding to an additional four geographies over the course of the year.
That means we'll cover around half of our total geographies by the end of 2022. In addition, we still see plenty of opportunity to expand performance of the offering in the geographies where market is already live, with focus on two core dimensions. Firstly, continuing to expand and improve the assortment, focusing on solution-oriented, added-value products, and starting to build a deeper private label offering. Secondly, driving higher conversion of the existing assortment by improving the way we integrate the offering into our existing customer journey, optimizing pricing strategy, and personalizing the experience. Another element of our monetization strategy will be the rollout of our new modular recipe feature. Historically, we focused on expanding the number of recipes to increase variety, but with modular recipes, we'll start to offer customization within the recipe itself. So how does it work?
For some recipes, customers can swap an ingredient for another that they prefer. For example, switching out pork for chicken. In this case, we see higher order rates from customers as they're more likely to find a set of meals that suit their personal dietary preferences. In other cases, we allow customers to upgrade their meal, paying extra to add a more premium protein like salmon or steak in place of the regular protein, which results in higher average order value. Finally, for some recipes, customers can add different elements to their dish, like an extra side serving, also for an additional fee, contributing again to higher average order value. Modular recipes have only recently piloted, but show really strong traction.
Currently, less than 20% of our global recipes have modular elements, and we plan to expand this significantly over the next few years, roughly doubling the share of modular recipes by the end of 2022. If you combine our investments into HelloFresh Market and modular recipes with our existing upsell offerings of recipe upgrade and extra meals, we see the potential to drive a significant share of revenue from additional products going forwards. Today, these products collectively drive around 6% of revenue across the group, and we expect to grow this to 15%-20% in the midterm as we expand the portfolio and launch these offerings across more markets globally.
One final note, increasing customer monetization is not only a big opportunity for driving top-line growth, it will also contribute to significant bottom-line expansion since introduction of these new products comes with minimal incremental fixed costs, little to no additional marketing spend, and so additional contribution margin drops straight through to the bottom line. To summarize this section, we're well on track to delivering on the midterm growth ambitions we laid out in last year's Capital Markets Day, reaching EUR 10 billion revenue with strong double-digit margins. After another excellent year, we still see significant opportunity in our core business. On top of that, we're seeing more and more contribution from the various new growth initiatives across TAM expansion and monetization, despite many of these initiatives still being in very early stages of development.
The success of many of these growth initiatives is enabled by the strong foundational capabilities we've built across the business. Now I'll hand over to Thomas to introduce this next section.
I'm Thomas Griesel, CEO International at HelloFresh. Obviously, 2021 has been a remarkably successful year for us, both from a top-line but also from a bottom-line point of view. Now, besides managing the business on a day-to-day basis, we've also invested heavily into continuing to build core capabilities and the platform that form the foundation of our development in the years to come, and that we also believe to be a unique competitive advantage. Now, what we would like to do today is take a closer look at five of these core capabilities.
Now, there are many more that we could talk about, but basically what we would like to focus on today is to give you an overview on what we're doing when it comes to capacity expansion in our production facilities, to give you an overview on what we're doing in last mile, so insourcing deliveries to our customers. Probably most importantly, we will talk about what we're doing in tech, because tech fuels and drives everything that we're doing, and the tech solutions are a massive drivers for the improvements in the years to come. We will talk about new verticals, which is about applying all of the skill sets that we have in operations, in direct-to-consumer marketing, and in tech, and apply them to building adjacent businesses.
Lastly, we will also talk about situations where it is more efficient to acquire rather than to build, so about our M&A capability. First of all, let's take a look at what we have been doing and what we have on the roadmap when it comes to capacity expansion in our production facilities. Let's jump back one year, and let's take a look at our global production footprint. At the end of 2020, we had 25 production facilities, and that footprint and that capacity allowed us to deliver a complex product in a just-in-time supply chain and to deliver that product to our customers on time, in the markets that we were active in at the time. Since then, we haven't stood still, so our product has become significantly more attractive and hence complex.
We have further improved our supply chain, and probably most importantly, we've also almost doubled our revenues since then. In order to reflect that and in order to make sure that we are prepared for future growth, we've also heavily expanded our production footprint. When you look at that same map again at the end of 2022, you will realize how many dots, accordingly how many production facilities we will have added. Basically, the foundation for that is the great playbook that we have that allowed us to add so many production facilities in a short two-year time period.
That step-up is even more impressive when not just looking at the number of sites that we're adding, but when also looking at the space we have available in these sites. Between 2020 and 2022, we will have expanded our production space by 2.5x globally, with similar increases across the two clusters that we operate in. In total, we will have more than 500,000 sq m of production space, which will allow us to deliver EUR 10 billion of revenues out of that production space. Okay. Apart from preparing us for future growth, there are also several other reasons for us to invest in expanding our production footprint. The first reason is creating more efficiency. Basically, the reason for that is when you operate close to your max capacity, it is very hard to push for efficiency measures.
To give you one example, you are basically trying to avoid producing on Sundays because typically in most markets you have to pay hefty surcharges to your workforce to work on Sundays, and accordingly, if you're able to eliminate that by not operating close to your max capacity, you unlock additional efficiency. Secondly, more space also allows you to introduce automation. Next year, we will have two very sophisticated automation concepts going live, and it goes without saying that you need space in order to introduce such concepts. Also, more space gives you more flexibility in your operations. You're able to shift volume between production days, between sites, and you're also more resilient to external shocks in your supply chain.
Also, you can innovate faster, so you can launch new products quicker if you are able to carve out a certain proportion of your production space to such innovative products. Lastly, with additional space, we are also able to eliminate some of the very high-cost, short-term overflow production facilities that we needed to bring online in order to cope with the demand spikes that we've seen. To summarize, the heavy investment into additional production space allows us to be prepared for future revenue growth, to operate more efficiently, and to develop a more attractive and therefore more complex product portfolio. Moving on to the second core capability that we wanted to talk about, which is last mile. Last mile is about insourcing our deliveries, so actually delivering boxes to our customers with our own fleet of vehicles.
That is the capability that we've already leveraged and applied in five of our largest markets, and in fact, we will expand our footprint in these markets. What is easy to underestimate in that context is the huge role technology solutions play in ensuring efficient deliveries, and we are delivering most of these technology solutions in-house. The great advantage we have is that we can use the playbook that we have developed in markets like the Benelux or in Australia, where we have several hundreds of vehicles on the road on any given day each, and we can apply that blueprint wherever we decide to launch our own fleet of vehicles. Lastly, building out our sortation and service hubs also plays a big role in ensuring efficient deliveries. Now, why are we doing it? What are the advantages we're getting from taking deliveries in-house?
First of all, we're able to improve the service levels we can offer to our customers. What you see on the left here is the on-time delivery rate in Australia since having taken logistics in-house. That rate is really not something you would see from your average carrier. Also, it is an opportunity for us to save cost and create additional revenue, especially in areas where we have a lot of customer density and accordingly stop density. To illustrate that point, think about a large and very densely populated metropolitan area in the U.S., for example, where there are a lot of HelloFresh customers, and accordingly, we can achieve very high stop density as well. That puts us in a position to deliver more cost efficiently than third-party carriers. Lastly, it also allows us to innovate faster.
To illustrate that point, think about the two-hour time windows that our customers in the Netherlands can typically choose from on any given delivery day versus the standard eight-hour time window that our customers in the U.S. are getting from the likes of UPS and FedEx. With that, I will hand it over to my colleague, Annie, who will walk you through the tech section.
Hi, my name is Annie. I'm the SVP Product, and together with our engineering leaders, I lead our technology teams at HelloFresh. With more than 800 people, we're the second-largest team in the company after fulfillment. Today, I want to share with you some insights on how our proprietary software solutions make our business perform better. By automating processes, we become faster, less error-prone, and can bring a better user experience to life. By integrating our systems in smarter ways, we generate better data for more reliable decision-making all across the company. Let's dive into some examples to illustrate our impact on the physical product, our supply chain, our marketing activities, and of course, our digital product. Our menu is at the core of the HelloFresh product. Years ago, our menu planning process was very manual.
Well, pretty much a team of chefs generated the menu based on their professional experience, similar to what you would expect them to do at a restaurant. Today, the menu planning process is powered by an algorithm solving for several variables at once. By creating a large learning loop using millions of data points from user-generated reviews to ingesting years' worth of internal metrics and external correlations, we're able to really understand the taste profiles of our customers, predict trends, and cater to local customization needs. All of this very fast. This improves our customer satisfaction and boosts our order rates every week. At the same time, we can reliably control our costs given budget constraints, run scenarios, and proactively mitigate risks, such as avoiding exposure to rising prices from certain ingredients. The end product of this service is a cost-effective menu that our users really love.
A similar example is our packaging configurator. Small companies typically have two standard sizes of packaging and then choose the better one. For food, we need something more sophisticated. Our packaging algorithm takes data inputs such as ingredient types and measurements, carriers, time and transit, and seasonal data points into consideration and converts them into optimized packaging specs. By calculating the right box size, the right amount of insulation and cooling materials customized for each order, we can not only reduce our environmental footprint and save costs, but also make sure we protect the contents of the box and overall ship a higher quality product. Let's move on to marketing. As a direct-to-consumer brand, spending our advertising dollars efficiently is incredibly important and something we see as a key competitive advantage.
At the same time, the marketing landscape is frequently changing due to new platforms and technologies emerging, but also regulators frequently demanding a change of practice. To stay on top of this dynamic environment, we have invested heavily in building up our teams in this area over the past years. This is now paying off. You've probably heard about the changes with regards to data sharing and tracking technology announced by Apple and Google. They have already led to cost headwinds for many e-commerce players across the industry. We were able to largely mitigate this trend using a new tracking technology which moves us closer to a cookie-less world. About a year ago, we started to establish server-to-server tracking and reduced our reliance on third-party cookies. With this shift in technology, we can now share more complete as well as richer data sets directly with our advertising partners.
This leads to better audience targeting and a faster website, which are key drivers for higher conversion rates and lower cost of acquisition. Before we dive into some examples of our digital product, I want to spend some time on our experimentation program. Running experiments is really the backbone of our capability to continuously add value with high levels of confidence. We believe there's no better way to learn than by experimenting with real users in a live environment, and we believe there's no better way to optimize the digital product than by comparing real business outcomes between these variants. Our growing portfolio of brands and geographies allows us to run many experiments in parallel, setting up a powerful learning loop. With every successful experiment, we improve our product and learn more about our users. This has a great compounding effect over longer periods of time.
In the past month alone, we ran more than 200 experiments with 54,000 participants on average, taking advantage of the massive traffic levels we have. Given our learning curve to date, our success rate is significantly higher than the industry average. Now, I picked out three examples to describe how this works in more detail. First, coming back to our menu. The idea of our recipe sorting experiment was to increase menu appeal by personalizing the order of recipes and displaying the best matches to user preferences on top. During our experiment, we were able to prove this hypothesis by measuring higher order rates and bigger basket sizes. Users simply found what they liked faster without extensive scrolling and were attracted to more meals.
This feature now allows us to expand the size of our menu in each market and append more choice to the menu without diluting relevance. Our price testing framework enables us to continuously understand price elasticities in our markets in four different product lines. This data gives us confidence that we can price our products at the ideal levels and helps us understand when to act, for example, to withstand competition. Additionally, we constantly experiment with our fraud management system, which is based on a bespoke credit scoring model and basically gives us an idea about which customers are unprofitable to acquire.
In a recent experiment, we've changed our rules and allowed formerly profitable customers to create new profiles and check out again, which has shown very positive profit contributions. I hope these examples have helped you understand why we think we have a huge opportunity ahead of us and are investing heavily in our six tech hubs across the globe. For each of the 1,000 new tech roles created, we have high expectations in terms of ROI and make sure that each initiative we run is at least hitting the 10x mark. With that, I would like to hand over to my colleague, Mike Apostal, who will tell you more about how we apply our capabilities to Factor.
Hi, all. My name is Mike Apostal, and I'm the Co-founder and CEO of Factor. It's my pleasure today to talk to you about Factor and the success that we've had in applying the HelloFresh capabilities to our business. The Factor business originally started in 2013, but really took shape a couple years later when I partnered with a friend to solve a challenge, the dream of having a private chef to eat clean, healthy, nutritious food and remove the kitchen hassle and mess. Most people cannot afford that. Factor was born to provide fresh, never frozen, balanced, and delicious meals straight to consumers' doorsteps at an attainable price. Now, as part of the HelloFresh fam, our goal is to contribute to the vision of being the world's leading fully integrated food solutions group by being best in class in the ready-to-eat space.
At Factor, our mantra from the very beginning has been, "Every meal matters." Our team is devoted to providing the highest quality meal experience through top-of-the-line ingredients, dietician-approved and balanced meals, all with the convenience of having food ready to go after two minutes in the microwave. Over an eight-year journey, we incrementally built our product capabilities and scaled our geographic reach. This has given us the operational foundation to deliver a best-in-class product and scale fast. As a result, 2021 has been a year of insane growth. We've increased capacity 175%, expanded menu size by 40%, and built out a distinct add-on portfolio. One of the core reasons why the partnership with HelloFresh was compelling to us was the demonstrated expertise and strong talent that HelloFresh has in marketing, operations, and technology.
This past year, Factor has ramped up marketing efforts across online and offline media channels, from Facebook to influencer marketing, video streaming advertisements to direct mail, and even doubling down on referrals. We want to get our product and message in front of potential customers while maintaining a diversified marketing mix. Since leveraging HelloFresh's expertise in growth marketing, we've seen our customer acquisition costs come down by 54%. Factor currently delivers to 48 states. It takes a lot of packaging, gel packs, and partnership with logistics companies to make this happen on a weekly basis. Scale creates significant efficiencies across all parts of our supply chain, and by joining HelloFresh, we've been able to access rates that would have only been achievable at 20x-30x the scale of our standalone operation.
By leveraging economies of scale with HelloFresh, we saw a 16% savings in shipping and packaging alone. We are an e-commerce business, so our digital experience will always be a critical part of the Factor customer. We partnered with the HelloTech team to enhance our legacy platform and technology backbone, and over the past few months, we have been migrating to HelloFresh's platform. Because of the investments in technology and experimentation that HelloFresh has made, we've been able to meaningfully improve many key aspects of the Factor customer experience, whether that is navigation through the site, purchasing of add-ons, or recommending friends. For example, since migrating, we've seen a 37% improvement in new customer conversion rate. These synergies and growth strategies have allowed Factor to operate a more efficient business with strong marketing spend ROI, allowing us to invest in more aggressive growth.
This aggressive growth has allowed us to significantly build our market share. At the time of the acquisition, our shared goal was to become the number one player in the ready-to-eat space, and I'm thrilled to say that we've achieved this goal in under 10 months. In order to do this, we have achieved revenue 3.5x year-on-year. At the same time as this massive growth, we have also expanded our menu by 40% while maintaining our industry-leading recipe ratings. We're also anticipating our first break-even year in 2021. All of these achievements are a testament to the benefits of combining our complementary skill sets and the success of Factor's integration into the HelloFresh group. As we look forward to 2022 and the longer timeframe, I have full confidence that Factor will continue this growth momentum while the ready-to-eat category expands overall.
More and more customers are looking to the ready-to-eat space for ultimate convenience. Currently, we're cooking and shipping everything from our Chicago locations. While we have had a period of capacity constraint in the last few months given our rapid scaling, in order to serve more customers, we have a number of expansion projects planned and will be unconstrained from the start of 2022. These include the upgrade of our existing facility and the launch of an additional facility in Chicago. We've also initiated the build-out of a new facility on the West Coast that allows us to achieve our longer-term objective of scaling to more than $1 billion in revenue. Along with our physical operation expansion, we will continue to invest in our technology platform to improve the digital experience with enhancements that allow customers more choice and flexibility.
While Factor is still US-centric, we're eager to launch in additional territories as opportunities arise. We strongly believe that the ready-to-eat space will continue to grow both domestically and abroad as well. Since our marketing spend ROI is now in line with HelloFresh, we are very confident that we can not only build a large business, but also one that can deliver double-digit adjusted EBITDA margins longer term. To sum it up, Factor has had an incredible year. We were laser-focused on the end goal, being the leading player in the RTE space. We have achieved that, but we're definitely not done. We will continue to devote resources to improve performance across all facets of the business, enhance the customer experience, both with physical and digital product, and know that even as we scale, every meal matters.
To summarize the sections, the strong investments into our core capabilities and into our infrastructure that we talked about, so into expanding our production capacity, our last mile capabilities, tech, and applying that to building new verticals and to M&A really form a strong competitive advantage versus direct competitors, but also versus any potential entrant into our industry. As more and more of customers' food budgets will move online, we believe that companies who are heavily investing into building their own infrastructure and building their own capabilities are best positioned to benefit from that development. We are certainly one of these companies heavily investing into that. Investing into these core capabilities makes us a stronger and more robust company. Hence, when making decisions about capital allocation, we will always prioritize building up our own capabilities and our own infrastructure.
In the next section, we would like to do a deep dive in the area of sustainability as we've done last year. Obviously, the topic of sustainability is extremely important to us at HelloFresh. At HelloFresh, we also have a lot of business model inherent advantages over traditional players in the food space. Apart from that, we're also working very hard on a broad range of initiatives to further improve, to make sure we're meeting our customers' demands, to make sure we're prepared for future regulation, and ultimately, also to ensure that we're doing the right thing. Let's start by taking a look at our ambition. Our ambition in the area of sustainability is to provide the most sustainable food solution at scale to our customers across all of the markets that we're operating in.
As I said before, sustainability is a topic that is extremely important to us, and hence, we've also gave out goals that we can measure us against. Let's start by taking a look at the goals that we set ourselves at the end of last year. Back then, we set we would achieve an ISO 50001 certification. We set we would do a materiality assessment. We set we would do a lifecycle assessment. We would do a supply chain risk mitigation exercise. We would fund a Plastic Bank, and we would also develop and implement our own energy strategy. We have managed to deliver on all of these, despite obviously having to put a lot of effort and attention, managing the business, and managing the explosive growth that we've seen throughout this year.
Moving on from these targets to the quantitative targets that we've set for ourselves. The first target is in the area of carbon emissions. We set that versus the 2019 baseline, we would reduce our greenhouse gas emissions by at least 60% until 2022. The second target is about food waste. We would reduce the food waste to landfill by at least 50% versus the 2019 baseline until 2022. Also, we're the first global carbon neutral meal kit company by offsetting all of the remaining greenhouse gas emissions that there are. Now, how are we doing against these quantitative targets? First, let's look at our carbon emissions. When it comes to carbon emissions, we have been able to continue on the very positive trajectory that we have been on throughout the past few years.
In 2021, we have reduced our carbon emissions versus the 2019 baseline by more than 50%, and we're well on track to meeting the 2022 target of only emitting 2.3 g per EUR of revenue. Also, when it comes to accounting for how we go about our renewable energy credits, we take an extremely conservative approach right now. If we were to be slightly less conservative when it comes to that, we would probably also achieve the 2022 target within this year. Overall, when it comes to carbon emissions, we're making a lot of great progress. How are we actually achieving that? There are several driving factors behind this.
First of all, we have massively increased the share of renewable energy we're using, and that is both on the buying energy side, but also on the producing energy side. For example, with the solar panels on the roofs of our production facilities. What we're also doing is massively electrifying our own fleet of delivery vehicles. Within 2021 we have increased that share to 20%, taking the Netherlands as an example. As I mentioned before, we've also developed and implemented our energy strategy, and part of that energy strategy is really making sure that energy efficiency is a key decision criterion when deciding on which technical equipment to buy, when assessing our suppliers, and when thinking about new production facilities. Moving on to the second target around food waste.
Here we're also making progress, but the situation is slightly more challenging as we faced a few headwinds throughout this year. Overall, we have a long-term trend of continuing to reduce food waste. In fact, we had made a lot of progress last year. At the beginning of this year, we've seen more volatility as the consequence of supply chain interruptions in a few markets due to COVID, as a consequence of us increasing our product portfolio and hence increasing the uncertainty in our forecasting, and thirdly, also as a consequence of ramping up new production sites, which leads to higher inventory and accordingly to higher buffers. Having said that, throughout the year we have been able to reduce it further.
I think Q4 will look even better, and we have a very strong strategy in place to ensure that we will also meet the 2022 target, which is very ambitious. Looking at that strategy in a bit more detail, the first element of that strategy is to avoid overproduction and over-ordering as much as possible. The key aspect for that is developing better tech solutions. For example, the digital meal kitting platform that we have has already reduced overproduction by 4 percentage points. Now, it will not always be possible to entirely avoid overproduction and therefore the second layer is to donating products that have been overproduced, and in that area we're partnering up with charities, and I will talk about that in more detail later on.
Lastly, there are also cases where products either have such short shelf life or, where products are of relatively low quality, so we cannot donate them, and there we're partnering up with farms or with biogas producers so that products can still be used there instead of having to discard them. With that, let's look at our sustainability strategy more broadly. As I said before, sustainability is an area that is immensely important to us, and it really has been immensely important to us ever since having launched HelloFresh ten years ago. So far, we've mostly focused on the area that we have the most and direct control over, which is the environmental impact of our own operations, which you see here in the middle.
Now, going forward, what we would like to do is really take a more holistic look at our value chain as a whole, so to ensure that we also look at the upstream effects as well as the downstream effects. What we mean by that is that on the upstream side, we increasingly work with our suppliers to set standards and help our suppliers actually achieve these standards. On the downstream side, looking at our customers, it is really about making sure that our customers can make informed and conscious decisions when it comes to food consumption. For us, it is really about having a more holistic view along the entire value chain and having a more holistic ESG strategy going forward. Looking at that strategy in a bit more detail.
It all starts with doing regular materiality assessments, and these materiality assessments really tell us what are the areas that we need to improve on and how we should prioritize that. The result of these materiality assessments really dictates how we go about our sustainability strategy. The first step there, as I said before, is really doubling down on improving the environmental effect of our own operations. We will take this beyond just focusing on carbon emissions and food waste. We will also look at packaging waste, and we will also look at sustainable sourcing. Having mentioned sustainable sourcing, that is already at the intersection of looking at our value chain as a whole. As I said before, looking at the up and downstream effects that we have.
Lastly, we really want to ensure that everything we're doing, so all of the measures we have in place, are also being taken into our ESG reporting so that we create more transparency, more visibility on what we're doing, and that this is also featured on our ESG governance side, so to make sure that we also have a best in class setup there. That may have sounded a little abstract. What do we mean by that, and what does that actually look like in practice? As I said, reducing packaging material is a very important aspect, and it's part of the broadened scope that we have in ESG now. Annie already talked about the dynamic packaging configurator.
Basically, this is a tool that allows us to have a minimal amount of packaging for each combination of products, so for each configuration our customers might order, and obviously that helps us to reduce packaging material as much as possible. Now, reducing packaging material is not always possible. Where it is not possible, at least we try to shift the mix of materials used in a more sustainable direction. That is actually what you see here, and that's an example from Germany where we have been able to reduce the amount of plastic we're using and replace plastic with cardboard as much as possible. There are way more examples for what we're doing in packaging. In the U.S., after extensive testing, we have rolled out sending boxes without insulation liners.
As a customer in Wisconsin, for example, in winter, you might receive the same great quality product, the same great quality box, but without an insulation liner, and the reason for that is that the temperatures in your area in winter will allow us to do so. We're working in a very similar direction in the U.K., where we stopped treating all boxes the same and including the same amount of ice in all boxes, but to really look at individual travel times and individual weather conditions, and to adjust the amount of ice we're using accordingly. Lastly, in Australia, we made our suppliers deliver to us in reusable containers, so that way we eliminate single-use packaging solutions. Another area that I said we would increasingly invest into is sustainable sourcing.
Now, the challenge with sustainable sourcing is that there are a lot of things that are summarized in that term, and it can mean a lot of different things to different people. It can include animal welfare, working conditions, environmental questions, et cetera, et cetera. The challenge with that is that it means different regulatory frameworks in the markets that we're active in, and it also means that customers' perceptions are quite a bit different across markets. How we plan on tackling that is by setting global minimum standards, first of all. That is about having an ethical trading policy in place. It is about having a process, a global process, to certify our products and our producers. It is about having animal welfare standards, and it is about ensuring traceability of ingredients in our supply chain.
On top of these global standards, we also have regional initiatives to, first of all, ensure local procurement, local sourcing, but also making sure that we can really cater towards the needs and expectations of customers in that respective market. Midterm, we will also work towards increasingly lifting these standards, so lifting the bar and really making sure that all of our suppliers are always complying with these standards, and therefore, we will invest even more into having very, very regular supplier audits everywhere. Apart from working with our suppliers, as I said, we also want to ensure that our customers can make conscious and informed decisions when it comes to food consumption. The first example for how we want to ensure that is by massively increasing the share of vegan and vegetarian options. In fact, that is something that we've already done over the course of this year.
We've massively increased the share of delicious vegan or vegetarian recipes, and not just to cater to vegan or vegetarian customers, but also to give other customers a choice. That has proven to be really successful. 27% of recipes sold are already vegetarian recipes. The second example is from Germany, where we introduced Klimaheld or Climate Hero recipes that have a significantly lower carbon footprint compared to normal recipes. Again, we're putting customers in a position to make an informed choice about their food consumption. As I said before, we also want to put an increasing focus on the S in ESG, so on social initiatives.
To give you one example for the many things we're already doing in that area, we have donated more than 1.5 million meals in the U.S. alone this year in our Meals with Meaning program, and we have partnered up with the cities of Newark and New York, among others, to get this done. The next area that we have made great progress in is ESG governance. First of all, we have established a dedicated subcommittee for ESG on our supervisory board. Secondly, ESG has become part of the remuneration system for us as the management team. ESG is also an integral part of our internal risk management system, both outside in and inside out. We're really looking at ESG related risks there.
Lastly, as I said before, we really want to create more transparency, more visibility with regards to what we're doing, and part of that will be to also do ESG and governance related roadshows and investor meetings. To summarize this section, we have achieved all of our 2021 sustainability targets. We are well on track to reach our quantitative 2022 targets. We are in the process of broadening the scope of our ESG approach, so really looking at the value chain as a whole, also taking into account packaging waste, sustainable sourcing, the up and downstream effects in our supply chain. We also want to make sure that you can measure us against these things, and therefore, we want to put out targets for the future that you can measure us against. These targets are, first of all, in the area of food waste.
Besides having a quantitative target on that one, we want to make sure that we have anaerobic digestion or composting options in all of our production facilities. Secondly, all of our new production facilities should have a zero waste to landfill option in place. For emissions, again, next to having a quantitative target, we commit to setting science-based targets next year. To make it apparent how we want to contribute to getting to a carbon emission free future. The third goal is to continue to develop our energy strategy, part of which is building a 3 MW solar plant in our new German production facility. It is about rolling out or increasing the share of electric vehicles in our delivery fleets. In procurement, we will introduce tracking our greenhouse gas emissions on a per recipe level.
Lastly, when it comes to diversity, equity and inclusion, we'll start creating end-to-end transparency and the matching frameworks and quantitative analysis around them to really ensure that we have a status quo and that we are in a position to track the progress that we're making with all of the initiatives we have in place in that area. With that, I will hand it over to Christian, who's going to walk you through the financial section.
Okay. Thank you, Thomas. My name is Christian. I'm CFO of HelloFresh since 2015. It's great to be with you all today. What I would like to kick it off is a brief recap where we got to so far from a financial perspective. We have delivered 10 years of consistently strong revenue growth. We grew around about 50% plus every year between 2015 and 2019, and then more than 100% in 2020, and are targeting around about 60% this year. We've done that while building one of the most profitable e-commerce companies globally. We turned profitable as a group in 2019 and since have meaningfully expanded our profitability to around EUR 500 million in 2020, and this year, 2021, we will hopefully do the same.
Now, we've achieved this, i.e., consistent industry-leading growth and strong profitability primarily because of two factors. One, our very disciplined focus on unit economics and customer profitability. I would like to come back to that actually in a couple of minutes. Then secondly, our strong focus on the long term. Now, what do we mean with that? We have never focused on short-term margin optimization, but on long-term value creation. When you look at 2015 through 2017, for example, this is the period where our first international markets started to turn profitable. During that period, we invested heavily in the ramp-up of our U.S. business, and that U.S. business by now has become a $4 billion business with a more than 10% EBITDA margin on its own.
When you look at 2018 and 2019, when our HelloFresh brand then in the U.S. started to get towards profitability, we started to ramp up during that period, EveryPlate and Green Chef. Then also in International, we launched our first wave of additional international expansion. We launched the markets New Zealand, Sweden, and Denmark during that period. Then most recently in 2020 and 2021, we have embarked on a very substantial capacity build-out, both on the physical as well as on the tech side. Thomas and Enie have taken you through some of the things we've done and that we've got further in our planning here. Massive capacity build-out during that period. On top of that, we also made our first steps towards becoming an integrated food solutions group, i.e., we entered ready-to-eat, and we launched HelloFresh Markets, as Ed had discussed earlier.
We implemented our next wave of international rollouts. We launched in Norway and then more recently in Italy and in Japan. Our focus on unit economics and our long-term focus has helped us to be well on track to reach hopefully our midterm targets, which most of you, when we announced this for the first time in this forum exactly a year ago, found quite bold when we came out with those. We want to achieve at least EUR 10 billion revenues and EBITDA margin of 10%-15% that coupled with a best-in-class free cash flow generation by 2025.
Now, given our strong focus on unit economics, this is where I would like to start our discussion. Followed by a first indicative outlook for 2022, keeping in mind that it's still quite early to do that, and there are a number of uncertainties which we don't control ourselves fully. Lastly, I'd like to go through where from a more structural perspective, we see most upside to margin in the midterm. Okay, let's start with our unit economics. Firstly, why is this so important? Unit economics and customer profitability are effectively our most fundamental metrics which we use to manage our business and to allocate capital across our verticals, across our markets, and across our brands. Impact on customer profitability is also what in those tests that Annie has taken you through before, we are primarily testing for. What do we mean with unit economics?
It is the cumulative contribution profit we realize on average per customer over its lifetime. To be concrete, it's the average order value times the variable contribution margin, times your order rate, i.e., whether we get an order from you in any given week, times the retention rate. Those unit economics divided by our customer acquisition costs, that gives you our customer profitability. Our customer acquisition costs, that's an upfront investment from our perspective, and then those unit economics, they realize over the lifetime of a customer. Now, on this page, let's have a look how that looks like for a customer over his first eight deliveries. Let's start with average order value. The difference between gross and net average order value that you see on this page are effectively discounts and credits.
As you know, as a new customer, you receive a certain level of price incentives from us, typically over your first three to four deliveries on a decreasing magnitude. In illustrative round numbers, let's assume gross average order value is EUR 60. You get a 50% discount on your first order, so net average order value is EUR 30. Now, it costs us around about 60% of gross average order value to cover all variable ingredient and fulfillment costs on your order, i.e., in round numbers again, around about EUR 36. Thirty euros net average order value, EUR 36 cost attached to that. This means in our example, we make a slight loss on the first order that we get from you, EUR 30 minus EUR 36.
Now from the next order onwards, this contribution profit becomes positive already because those price incentives, as you see on that page, effectively roll off. With every incremental order, as those price incentives decrease and go to zero, that incremental contribution profit increases quite rapidly to more than 20 EUR per order. Now what we optimize for is effectively the sum of all of that contribution profit you see at the bottom of that page across a customer's lifetime. Okay, these are our unit economics spread over orders. Let's see how this means when we throw customer acquisition costs and retention into the mix. If you start on the very left of this page, on the left side of this chart, what you see here are effectively, we start with our customer acquisition costs. Yeah, so we're down by that amount.
A bit further to the right, you see that amount decreases a bit more. That's the negative contribution profit on your first order. Thereafter, we recover this upfront investment through positive contribution profit with every subsequent order. These curves here are already retention-weighted, i.e., they reflect the fact that some customers drop out along the way. A couple of really important points here. First one, and most importantly, these are very strong return on investment metrics. Our break-even periods on customer cohorts are well below six months. Reactivations, which are part of this, have a quasi-immediate break even. Remember the previous slide where we are profitable from the second order onwards. Reactivations have very little paid customer acquisition costs attached to them, therefore quasi-immediate break even to us. Then thirdly, we have further improved our customer ROI compared to an already strong pre-pandemic level.
We've done that because we increased our average order value, we increased our retention rates, and we increased our average order rates. Despite the fact that our contribution margins are temporarily compressed due to ongoing capacity expansion and some price inflation, we have increased our customer profitability from already very decent levels over the last three years. This is how we steer the business internally. The P&L view, which is more common to you, only provides you a certain snapshot for a given period, where customers of different stages in their life cycle are effectively all bunched together. With that, let me turn to my second topic today, i.e., provide you a very first indicative outlook for next year. Little caveat up front. It's obviously still early days. We're not even through 2021 yet, and there are a number of uncertainties going into next year.
For example, how and when economies are finally fully emerging from the COVID period, and also how an accelerating inflation trend will play out for us exactly. Let's start here on this slide with our top line. We continue to target very strong top-line growth next year, 20%-26% on a constant currency basis. This is after having grown in 2020 north of 100%, and this year by around about 60%. How do we want to achieve this? Firstly, through continued robust active customer growth of around about high teens. With respect to our active customer numbers, you should assume a normal seasonality, i.e., the biggest step-up in Q1, and then broadly stable with some sequential softening during the summer period. Number one, very strong active customer growth.
Secondly, we also see a good opportunity for further expansion of our average order value. Already in 2021, you've seen from us an expansion of average order value, primarily driven by our U.S. business. We think there's more room to grow average order value into next year. Key drivers will be an expansion of our Market's offering, more recipe upgrades and modular recipes, and more meals per order. Effectively, the drivers that Ed has outlined before. Now lastly, our quarterly average order rate, we expect to remain at the existing very healthy levels of around about four orders per active customer per quarter. On that metric, you've seen quite a shift upwards over the last two years already from previously 3.5 to four, and we think we can maintain those very high levels of four orders per quarter per customer. Okay, so that's top line.
Let's now turn to our indicative cost outlook for next year. The development of our expenses in the near term is really driven by two key topics. The first one is our continued focus on investing in the long-term growth of our business, and therefore a continuation of the substantial capacity expansion that we've embarked on. Secondly, certain near-term cost inflation. Let's start with the latter. There's a meaningful near-term price inflation in ingredients, especially with respect to proteins. Protein prices are up by more than 10% year-on-year, and proteins make up round about actually more than 50% by value of our ingredients. Now this means for our procurement expenses overall, that as a percentage of revenue, they're expected to increase next year by circa 1.5 points of revenues. Next, let's talk about our fulfillment expenses.
As you know, we are in the midst of a very significant expansion program across both segments and all of our verticals. This massive capacity expansion provides overall a certain near-term drag on our fulfillment costs versus the levels you've seen from us in 2020 and before. However, we are also planning to see an improving productivity versus 2021 for the fulfillment centers we have already recently launched. This especially applies to the second half of 2022. This means looking at the full year, 2022, we target even though that's not gonna be easy, but we target overall fulfillment expenses as percentage of revenue broadly in line with what you've seen from us in 2021 so far.
When you put all of this together, increasing procurement expenses and fulfillment expenses as percentage of revenue for the full year, broadly in line with 2021. This means our contribution margin will be somewhat down versus 2021, and that movement will be broadly in line with the increase in procurement expenses that I've talked about. From a seasonal perspective, assume normal seasonality. Same as this year, Q3 will be the quarter with the lowest contribution margin throughout the year. Okay, let's turn now to our marketing and G&A spend for next year. Given the very strong customer profitability that we discussed earlier, we plan to invest a similar relative share of revenue into marketing in 2022 as we did in 2021, i.e., somewhere between 14.5% and 15.5% of revenues.
We also see a strong opportunity in reactivations going into next year, which supports our high ROI on our marketing activities. Let's turn now to our G&A developments. As discussed on our prior earnings calls, we are meaningfully investing into our platform and into our people. This especially applies to our tech and data teams, where we are targeting to increase headcount from around about 800 developers right now to more than 1,300 by the end of 2022. We regard this as high conviction, high ROI spend, as it will enable us to further improve in the long run our product quality and complexity, our service levels, and our marketing efficiency. This investment means that G&A for the full year may increase by around about 0.5 percentage points of revenue versus 2021.
Putting all of this together, strong revenue growth and some near term margin compression. This means that even in a year where we are very meaningfully investing into the long-term growth and value creation for our business, and where we will be subject to certain transitory cost headwinds, we are targeting an absolute EBITDA which is broadly in line with 2021. To put this in numbers, we are indicatively targeting an EBITDA range of EUR 500 million-EUR 580 million for next year. Couple of important points here. This, by the way, includes a -EUR 140 million EBITDA contribution from the ramp-up of non-HelloFresh brands, new markets, the expansion of our platform, namely our global tech and data teams that I just referred to.
Secondly, when you look at our more mature developed businesses, i.e., the HelloFresh brand in the U.S. and our combined businesses in International, which are somewhat more developed, i.e., in existence for more than three years. Both of these groups target an EBITDA margin well above 10% next year again. We spoke about our spend for long-term value creation we plan in 2022 from a P&L perspective. Let's now also talk about the growth CapEx we are planning for next year. We plan to invest circa half a billion EUR next year, i.e., more than double our investments in 2021. This will largely complete our capacity build-out in the U.S. with at least two additional HelloFresh brand fulfillment centers, additional capacity for EveryPlate and GreenChef, and further meaningful capacity addition for Factor.
In International, we are on track to expand our capacity in a number of markets in Germany, in the U.K., in France, in Australia, Nordics, and Canada. We also plan a first organic launch of ready-to-eat in an international market. This is on top of the capacity expansion we are planning already for Youfoodz in Australia. This plan here also includes circa EUR 200 million, which are earmarked for automation CapEx. Once we are through that ambitious CapEx plan, this will bring us a theoretical revenue capacity meaningfully north of EUR 10 billion. Okay, it's quite clear that 2022 will be a year of quite significant investments into our long-term growth and value creation. It's also subject to certain short-term cost inflation. However, let me also be very clear that this does not change in any way our midterm margin target.
If you take 2022 as a baseline, there are a number of levers which we feel confident will expand our EBITDA margin to meaningfully above 10% by 2025 again. Now let me walk you through those. Firstly, on the COGS side, there are further scale efficiencies that we see across both segments. Secondly, on production. Here, because of the meaningful capacity expansion we have seen some compression recently, as you know. There's meaningful potential for us to expand productivity again, certainly in our new fulfillment centers which we've just launched or are about to launch, but also across our total production network. On top of that, we have an opportunity to use more automation to reduce labor intensity and increase our margin over time. On marketing, this is somewhat driven by how fast we target to grow beyond 2025.
Overall, as the share of new customers decreases, as our businesses mature, and we ramp up the share of reactivations, you should see marketing as a percentage of revenue to come down further. That's a continuation of the trend that you've seen from us already over the last four years, despite that strong growth that we've delivered over the same period. Lastly, please don't forget that we are ramping up a lot of growth areas in 2022. Italy, Japan, Norway, meaningful expansion of our HelloFresh U.S. brands on top of that, ready-to-eat roll out, just to name the most important ones. All of this costs us margin at the moment, but as these businesses prosper and mature, they will turn from net EBITDA consumption to breakeven and then at some point to net EBITDA contribution. That will basically further contribute to our midterm group margin.
Based on all these levers, we are very confident that we can increase our EBITDA margin by 2025 meaningfully beyond the 10% again.
Okay. With that, we all look very much forward to your questions.
Welcome back, everyone. Now that we've heard the presentations from our leadership team, we are now ready to start the analyst Q&A section of our event. If you would like to ask a question, please signal by pressing star and one on your telephone keypad. We'll pause for a moment to assemble a queue. As a reminder, all other participants can also submit questions through the webcast using the Ask a Question button. We will take our first question from Fabienne C. Caron with Kepler Cheuvreux. Your line is now active.
Good afternoon, everyone. Three quick questions from my side, please. The first one, can you help us understand the quantum leap that you did in terms of capacity increase compared to what you announced at the Q2? You said we're now waiting for 15 more production sites. How much did you have in mind when you first talk about increasing capacity as a Q2 result? Would be the first question. The second, is there a way where you could help us to quantify the cost inflation being more at the wage level or to get a feeling is it more expensive today to build and to run a CFC compared to before?
The last question would be, you said you would have 10 billion capacity already at the end of 2022, so why aren't you moving forward your midterm target in terms of sales, please?
Fabienne, thanks a lot for your questions. I hope, in general, that the presentation could already preempt a lot of questions that we know you all have. On capacity, very specifically, from the time at the beginning of 2020 until the end of 2022, we will have more than 2.5x-ed our capacity. More recently, from what we announced at the end of Q2, we have in the meantime basically increased our investment level and have penciled in two additional big sites in the U.S., just given that throughout the first half of the year, but now also towards the second half of the year and having more visibility into 2022 and where revenue should land, that we just need that to get towards the long-term capacity utilization goals that we have, which are around 70% capacity utilization.
It's really a direct consequence of the much faster growth momentum that we have seen both this year as well as what we anticipate going into next year. Christian, you wanna elaborate on the details?
Yeah, absolutely. Fabienne, on your question on wage cost inflation, if I got that right, effectively what we are planning with is versus 2021, round about a ballpark 10% increase in wages versus 2021. That's what's baked into that outlook. Production wages make up round about 10% of revenue, so that's round about 1% then from that.
However, despite us raising those wages and expanding capacity quite massively, as we discussed in the presentation, and Dominik has also again alluded to, we also target certain productivity increases across the board, but even more pronounced from some of the fulfillment centers we just recently opened up and which are right now not operating yet at productivity levels that they will have in a more balanced steady state. So that will largely offset the impact of wages. That's why from a fulfillment cost perspective, you should expect from us, at least from a full year perspective, that we will maintain those at a similar level as in 2021.
Yeah. On the long-term revenue target, so by the end of 2022, we will have meaningfully north of EUR 10 billion in theoretical capacity. Given the faster growth momentum, we still think it's prudent to stick with the 2025 goal of EUR 10 billion revenue and 10%-15% margin, not because we're not optimistic about the growth roadmap that we have in mind, but because we think it's prudent to actually have long-term goals. Long-term goals as the name implies, don't change every six or 12 months. As we kind of like make more progress and get closer to it, I'm sure, you know, we'll all work towards being hopefully able to over-perform them, but I don't think it's prudent to talk about long-term goals and then give an update every six or 12 months.
It's the same what we did with our growth strategy, right? We always talked about TAM penetration, TAM expansion, monetization in a very consistent manner since we IPO-ed the business, and the same framework applies to our long-term revenue and margin goals. We wanna be very consistent in what we communicate and how we communicate it, and we do feel that we're very well on track for it.
Okay. Thank you very much.
We will take our next question from Victoria Petrova with Credit Suisse. Please go ahead.
Thank you very much for taking my questions. My first one would be on current trading. How do Thanksgiving comps worked for you? Are you seeing anything new in the fourth quarter? Has there been any developments since you reported your third quarter results in November? My second question is on average order rate, and Christian mentioned that it you expect it to stay stable. But we've heard from your competitors, smaller competitors, that with sort of 50 recipes, with this choice of swap choices, usually average order rate goes from four to five times a quarter. Why you're not expecting that? Do I understand it correctly that EUR 140 million expected in 2022 could be treated as a one-off cost? Am I correct? My very last question is to Thomas.
Last year, when you presented on sustainability, you talked about mismatch between your ESG performance and your ratings. Has there been any development, or do you expect improvement on ESG ratings HelloFresh has? And are there any catalysts to watch? Thank you very much, and apologies for so many questions.
Viktoria, great questions. Firstly, let me hit the first couple of your questions. First one on current trading. Nothing in current trading that would change what we communicated before with respect to the full year. We're well on track to hit that upwards revised revenue guidance of 58%-62% that we had put out a couple of weeks ago with our Q3 results. Same from a profitability perspective. Nothing has changed meaningfully versus what we had discussed back then, i.e., that we see ourselves coming in round about the 9% margin with potentially a couple of basis points left or right to that. Yeah, no changes with respect to that out of our current trading.
With respect to our average order rates. It's great that you suggest to us to be even more ambitious in terms of our targets here. We feel it's quite good, yeah, to maintain average order rate at those four orders per quarter per customer. You remember we have lifted that quite meaningfully already versus where it was pre-pandemic, effectively. That was with a bit of seasonality, more at around 3.5. We increased that to four and kept it there now quite stable also the last couple of quarters. Can't comment on what some of our competitors do. The only thing I would say is if you compare our overall performance, the momentum that we preserved versus a lot of other-
Mm-hmm
e-commerce companies broadly, we feel quite good about our performance, frankly. The last point that was directed to me, EUR 140 million. I would not necessarily characterize them as a one-off. More see them really as an investment, yeah, into our long-term growth. This is really a couple of core areas such as ramp up of new markets where Japan, Italy, Norway to a certain extent fall into it as well. Further meaningful step up in our non-HelloFresh brands, including in the U.S., where we're creating a lot of new capacity, as we had discussed in the presentation, and the build-up of our tech platform here. Yeah, so all of that together is EUR 140 million.
We are very confident you will see a great return from that in the medium term, but I would not characterize them as one-off because at least with respect to those platform step up, those will stick with us. Yeah, we will rather continue to build on that expansion of our platform rather than take a step back at some point in the future.
Yeah. I think the broader point here is, without those additional EUR 140 million in costs, we would have probably still very much achieved the consensus growth rate we had before the Capital Markets Day, and as well would have easily achieved the EBITDA that we had pre that day.
Mm-hmm
We do feel, you know, we're a growth company. We want to invest in where we see opportunities, and we have very high conviction that those are all things that, in the coming years, will contribute to meaningful growth and allow us to really maximize our growth opportunity rather than scaling back on any growth opportunities because we want to preserve one or two points in EBITDA. That's not sort of like the philosophy that we have. With that, Thomas, couple of sustainability questions for you.
Yeah. On ESG ratings, indeed, it is something that we've put in a lot of work into over the course of this year to engage increasingly with rating agencies. Having said that, it is a time-consuming process to change ratings, predominantly because these ratings are mostly based on publicly available information. Having said that, Sustainalytics is doing a review right now. ISS will come at the beginning of next year. For MSCI, we've seen a slight improvement over the course of this year. I think the big update that's gonna come is at the beginning of Q2 next year, when we will publish a non-financial report.
That is really something where we put out a lot of new information, and we're also really looking forward to how that's going to be received by the rating agencies, and that's a point in time when I would also expect that hopefully there will be a re-rating.
Thank you very much.
We will take our next question from Adrien de Saint Hilaire with Bank of America. Your line is now open.
Thank you very much, guys, for taking the questions. So this is Adrien. The first question I would have, please, is what would be the drop through on EBITDA if by any chance you exceed your revenue growth assumption for 2022? The second question is, Christian, you gave us an indication for CapEx in 2022. I would be just curious to know what would be your normalized expectation for future years beyond 2022. Then maybe a last question for now, and thank you for all those details. Dominik, you showed us that slide about cohorts and net revenue retention over time for Q4. As you've mentioned a few times, Q1 is typically your big quarter in terms of subscriber addition.
I was just wondering if you could comment a bit on whether the trend would be any different for, let's say, a Q1 cohort behavior. Thank you very much.
Let me maybe very quickly comment on the last question because the answer is very simple, exactly or pretty much exactly the same. It's just that we wanted to use the last cohorts. Otherwise, I think a lot of people would have asked, "Why don't you use the last cohorts?" That's the only reason they look exactly the same. Adrien, on your other two questions. The first one on drop-through margin from potentially exceeding revenue targets. This is a bit dependent on where the growth comes from. If we ramp, for example, one of our new geographies or new brands even faster than what we have in the plan, this will near-term dilute EBITDA.
Obviously, longer term, it helps us to build really sizable businesses then in these areas which will generate a lot of profitability. Near term, that would represent more dilution to EBITDA. If it's further growth or more growth in our developed markets, then the drop through should be in line with what I had discussed when I went through the unit economics. Once new customers roll off initial price incentives, the margin is basically in the high 30%-40% on the incremental revenues that they would generate. Sorry, on your second question on CapEx, what's the normalized level? If you assume around 2% of revenues, that is ballpark the right zone, I would say.
Thank you so much.
Once again, that is star and one if you would like to ask a question. As a reminder, if you would like to ask a question over the web, you may do so by submitting your questions via the Ask a Question tab. We will take our next question from Maryam Sherazi with Morgan Stanley.
Great. Good afternoon, everyone. Thanks for the presentation. I have three questions from me. Firstly, just on 2022, could you just give a bit more color about what you're expecting in terms of active customer growth by region? I think the U.S. has been growing a bit faster than international for the last few quarters. Would you expect most of the growth to come again from the U.S., or will international be growing faster because of the new markets you're adding? I just wanted to find out what you're assuming in the model next year for any normalization post-COVID. I understand that you said that you do believe a lot of the shift is structural, but just wondering what you've been factoring for that in terms of customer behavior next year.
Finally, if you could just talk a bit about the complexity of the model. You're introducing modular elements, reducing path of times, and what impact this is having on your cost structure. I think you said that you believe that you can leverage this across your fixed cost base, but just would be interesting to see how the variable costs are changing relative to some of these additional features you're introducing. Thank you.
Yes. Maryam, let me start with active customer growth by region. For the group, I guided you towards high-teens growth for next year. I would say what you articulated is reasonable, i.e., that we expect our U.S. segment to grow slightly ahead of our International segment in terms of both active customer growth as well as revenue growth next year. Not massive differences between the two segments, but the U.S. somewhat ahead. We should expect the U.S. to probably deliver a touch higher growth between the two segments and from a margin perspective, International to be a touch above our U.S. segment.
Now, in terms of normalization, coming out of COVID, what I guided to when I discussed top line earlier, that's really what we consider a reasonable case for a quite normal period. I.e., or to put it differently, the guidance and our targets for 2022 are not predicated on baking in any further hard lockdown in any of our major markets or anything like that. Then Maryam, I'm sorry, on your third question, do you mind to just repeat that? I actually didn't get that acoustically.
Yeah. You're adding a lot more complexity to the model in terms of the modular elements around recipes, reducing cutoff times. Just wondering what the impact of this on the cost structure is?
There is a certain impact, but this again is baked into both what we communicated with respect to our 2022 goals, but also baked into the midterm goals that we've repeated here from a profitability perspective.
Great. Just to follow up on that, so with the cutoff time of two to three days, do you think this is where you hope to be in steady state, or do you think there's room to decrease that further? Is there any demand from customers for even faster cutoff times or shorter cutoff times?
I think the whole aspect of convenience and then also on reducing the time from order to delivery is certainly a concept that resonates strongly with some customer segments. I would say for the vast majority of our current customer base, that's not something that would make a huge difference. We do believe that it actually helps us attract new customer segments that at the moment are either not ordering at all or not ordering with high frequency.
In actually improving the customer value proposition to them, especially to those people that actually value faster delivery times, we think that will allow us to attract new customer segments better and then also increase frequency with some customer segments that are already HelloFresh customers, but are not ordering as frequently, as, you know, they could if we had shorter order to delivery times. It's really about, like, improving the customer value proposition, and I do think it's something that on the margin will help us. I also do think that a lot of weeknight dinner cooking for the vast majority of our customer segments is actually something with high anxiety, with high planning involved, and most people do that not on the same day, but actually with a couple of days in advance.
That's why the current customer value proposition already resonates very well with the different customer groups that we have.
That's clear. Thank you.
We will take our next question from Sarah Simon with Berenberg. Your line is now active.
Yeah. Hi. I've got a couple of questions. First one is on the gross margin, and you've talked about inflation. Your peers have obviously all increased prices. Is it right to think that you're basically pursuing volume at a slightly lower margin over less volume at a higher margin, but more absolute gross profit? That would be the first question. The second one is around the automation. Can you give us a bit more color in terms of the expected payback time, what kind of projects you're talking about, and what kind of savings you could achieve on this EUR 200 million, and whether this is kind of the limit for automation, or is this just a first step and we might hear that you're gonna go further and deeper?
Some color there would be helpful. Thanks.
Sarah, let me tackle the first question. I think the logic that you outlined is pretty much in line with how we think about that. In the end, we're always going back to thinking about customer profitability, and that means looking at how you monetize a customer over his or her entire lifetime. This is really the sort of like framework that we apply first and foremost. We also look very closely at relative affordability. Basically, how expensive or affordable are our meals versus all of the competition out there? Certainly, if you look at customer profitability, that has never been higher for HelloFresh than it is today. If you look at affordability, that has also never been higher than it is today.
We see like a very good opportunity to actually broadly stick with the pricing that we have at the moment and actually continue with very high growth momentum. We do think that there are, you know, on the margin, certain opportunities to smartly sort of like capture a little more margin and some of that through higher pricing, but it's really kind of like going back to that customer profitability framework. I think here, you know, having such high customer profitability and such high relative affordability is just something that really kind of like helps us improve the customer value proposition. At the moment, we do think that we wanna stay broadly in line with the price levels that we have and not do the same that sort of like all of competition did.
In the end, you know, it always comes down to relative affordability. If everybody else is increasing prices and we, you know, might do something here or there, but not as much as others, we still increase our relative affordability. Those two lenses are really the two lenses through which we look at the overall pricing rationale and how and what level of pricing we actually pursue. Sarah, on your second question on automation payback and ROI savings that we're targeting. Maybe in general, for all of our capital expenditure projects, we target a payback of less than half of what the useful life of such a CapEx project is, and an ROI that is very meaningfully in excess of our WACC.
Now for the automation investments we do, we target even more ambitious levels, payback periods below what we assume for general CapEx projects. If you recall that very last page that I've shown with the different buckets of our midterm margin expansion, the one that was related to productivity increases, that bucket overall shows that we are confident to expand just by certain projects within our production that we target to expand midterm our margin through these initiatives by meaningfully north of 2%. Automation would make up a good half of that.
Just to make sure this is not just related to those, let's say, more sophisticated tests that Thomas had also mentioned, where we will effectively execute two during 2022, but also it is a lot of automation that we have in full flight in a number of our fulfillment centers already. We will just roll those tried and tested concepts already out across basically a broader scope of our fulfillment centers. That by itself covers quite a bit of those savings already.
This is all warehouse-based, I assume?
That's fulfillment center focused. Correct.
Fulfillment centers. Yeah. Okay. Thanks very much.
Sure.
We will take our next question from Andrew Quinn with BNP Paribas. Your line is open.
Hi there. Good afternoon. I wanted to pick up on a couple of points that have already been asked actually, but just to elaborate a bit more. In the U.S. grocery market, I think more than half of the market is now same-day delivery, so pretty substantial. If you were looking to tap into that opportunity, is there sort of very large distribution centers that you're opening? Are those a pathway forward, or would there be more logic in having much smaller fulfillment centers much nearer to a consumer for more rapid delivery? That's the first question, quite conceptual. I appreciate it. The second, and it comes back to your comments before Christian, but it feels like you're guiding towards a relatively slow recovery in margin back towards the 10%. We should have it in mind certainly post-2025.
In 2023, and maybe even 2024, the margins could well still be below that. Apologies if you've already reiterated or made that point, but just wanted to clarify. Thank you very much.
Andrew, on your first question, around conceptually how we think about our fulfillment centers and their location and in the broader context of the online food market, right? We very strongly believe what we have hopefully brought across during the presentation, that offline grocery will lose share of wallet to a wide variety of different online players, digital native brands, specialist retailers, et cetera. What all of us have in common is that we actually win on product fit rather than on proximity alone. There are some of those new players who want to win on, you know, proximity and on fast delivery and getting that to 15 or 30 minutes or at scale, whatever that is, whether that's 30 minutes or 60 minutes or whatever. There are a lot of other players that want to win on other things that resonate very highly with consumers.
I think for us, what consumers value most is really sort of like the meals that we have on offer, the wide variety of meals that we have on offer, so the product assortment, and then the convenience, the mental convenience, as well as the physical convenience of getting it delivered right home. I don't think that with the supply chain that we have, but also with the type of meals that we're going after, that we will ever want to compete with, you know, either 30 minutes delivery or same-day delivery. It's a different use case. If you think about offline grocers, they're catering to the use case where you just go into one store and pick up a ready meal. They're catering to the use case where you get some fresh food in there.
They're catering to the use case where you know, stock up your inventory. It's a lot of different use cases, and we're not aiming to target all of them. We're aiming to target a very few specific ones where we think we can do a much better job than what online grocers who want to be everything to everyone can actually do. Again, for us, it's really winning on variety, on having the best meals, on convenience, and we target like a very substantial share of meals that are being consumed at home, but definitely not everything. You know, on the margin, there will be customers that make a decision whether they order from us or from Gopuff or from somebody else. Overall, we're all taking massive share from offline grocers over time.
That's really the type of conviction that we have.
Andrew, on your second question, on margin trajectory, post-2022, I would say a couple of things. One, what hopefully was very clear on, in our presentation that 2022 is for us a year of very meaningful investments into our long-term growth. You see that reflected in both our CapEx as well as in our margin profile in that year, which by the way, is still better than probably 90% of other e-commerce companies out there who grow much less fast than we do. It is a year of certain investment.
With respect to the trajectory thereafter, if you recall that last page that I had in my presentation just now, when you look at the different buckets, I would say the first one, so expansion of margin coming from both COGS as well as productivity increases on the fulfillment side, you should assume that we clip those quite linearly between now and 2025. For the other two buckets, so marketing as well as maturing of our new businesses, they are probably a bit more back-end weighted. As you know, there's a certain investment phase and ramp-up phase, whether we launch a new geography or a new brand, where we're investing typically the first three years before that business gets to break even and then turns profitable.
It's a similar curve that you should assume there. Yeah. Those last two buckets are somewhat more back-end loaded. For the first two, you can well assume that those margin expansion drivers are quite linear between now and 2025 or between 2022 and 2025.
Yeah. Just one additional comment. It would be very easy for us to go straight to 10%+ EBITDA margin if we weren't growing as fast as we would. We don't wanna steer the business on an EBITDA margin. We wanna steer the business on what really drives long-term value, which is customer profitability. Our customer profitability has never been higher than it is today. That will necessarily translate into easily getting back to the levels of EBITDA that we have shown before or higher over the long run. In the end, sort of like customer profitability is a leading indicator of what you'll be able to generate in EBITDA, you know, as you gain scale and as you mature all of the growth opportunities that you have set in motion.
I mean, Dominik, you kind of answered my follow-up question, but is there sort of conceptual thinking here, which is it's better to maximize absolute profit and margin is kind of a, an output of that. It's not necessarily the objective in itself.
Correct. Like, I mean, it's obviously important, and we translate sort of like our customer profitability to what do we expect in EBITDA, and we're happy to give guidance on that, et cetera. Internally, we're thinking about where to best spend our incremental dollars, what can we get in return, and if we see very good return on spending those dollars through the P&L rather than, you know, through the balance sheet, then we will definitely also be more than happy to spend them through the P&L.
Okay. Fantastic. Thank you for your time. Thank you.
Once again, that is star and one if you would like to ask a question. As a reminder, other participants can also submit questions through the webcast using the Ask a Question button. We'll now take our next question from Fathima-Nizla Naizer with Deutsche Bank.
Great. Thank you for taking my questions. I have three. My first one is on the ideal sort of state of U.S. utilization that you mentioned you wanna stay at around 70%. Does this mean that if your revenue growth is better than expected, we could potentially see another wave of investments where you would have to add maybe significant amounts of capacity to sort of stay at that optimal 70%, or as the scale gets bigger, would that be less of a concern because you would still have a lot of headroom? Some color there would be great. My second question is, I think, Dominik, you previously mentioned that, you know, sometime in the future, you'd like a situation where you could have Ready-to-Eat and Meal Kits maybe offered to the same customer, you know, on the app.
Are you thinking this way when you think of this next wave of investments? Is this part of the plan? Some color there would be great. My last question is on the Factor sort of economics. How different is the Factor sort of fulfillment center set up? How complicated would it be to combine the two, and what's sort of the midterm and long-term margin profile of Factor? Would it be similar to the meal kit business? Some color there would be great. Thank you.
Nisla, let me tackle your first question. Is there a potential scenario if we grow faster that you will see another round of quite substantial CapEx from us beyond 2022? The answer is it's unlikely you would see that. We're obviously not planning for CapEx to suddenly go towards zero from 2023 onwards, but you should see certainly a step down. There will be an ongoing expansion of capacity also thereafter, but effectively more moderate fill-ins in line to what you've seen from us 2018, 2019, rather than the big push that you've seen from us this year and even more so you will see from us next year.
Some of that capacity expansion that we're currently doing is certainly with having in mind that we wanna build out our HelloFresh Market, for example, that we wanna have the ability to also combine ready meals and HelloFresh Market and our meal kits in the same delivery at some point in the future. Again, that's unfortunately still, like, probably a number of years, definitely a number of quarters out. This is the vision that we're working towards. When we actually now set up a new fulfillment center in the U.S., then we definitely already plan, you know, what is the space that we need to dedicate to scaling up our HelloFresh Market.
How much of that is dedicated to storing, for example, ready meals that we produce in Factor manufacturing sites and then bring in to actually also sell to our HelloFresh customer base? Those are definitely thoughts that we have and considerations that have been going into finding the right locations and also in designing and outfitting those locations as we build them over the next, you know, 12 months plus. I think the last one of your questions was around Factor and the manufacturing setup. If you think about our manufacturing center in a very conceptual and simplistic way, then, you know, the way that you inbound any goods, the way that you put those goods to storage, those things are pretty much in terms of the frameworks that we apply, very similar between Factor and HelloFresh.
When it then comes to cooking, this is basically a step that we don't have in our HelloFresh manufacturing sites, but what is really important in our Factor sites. Rather than going from inventory into meal kitting, you go from inventory into cooking, and then once you've cooked those meals, the assembly process, how you actually get Factor meals or meal kits into boxes and then, you know, outbound them to different carriers, that's again, sort of like pretty much the same. The difference is really between kitting different single ingredients into a meal kit versus cooking a whole Factor dish. That's really sort of like the difference. The rest in terms of, Nizla, the frameworks of the planning tools that we have, how we inbound goods, how we think about inventory, all these things are very much aligned between the two businesses.
Thank you. The margin for Factor in the mid to long term, could it be similar to sort of the 10%-15% or the 15%-20% that you've mentioned for the group in the long term?
Yes. I think there's no reason to think that it would be very different.
Understood. Thank you.
We will take our next question from Emily Johnson with Barclays. Please go ahead.
Hi. Thanks. I've got three questions. The first is, when you speak about this 15%-20% of revenues coming from up and cross-selling products in the medium term, i.e., growing share broadly among existing customers, how should we remedy that with the new customer growth and geographical expansion that you spoke about at the start of the presentation? If we assume that those additional products are the upper end, so 20% of your €10 billion revenue guidance for 2025 from 6% today, that implies a 9% CAGR on the underlying HelloFresh business, which seems low given the amount of new geographies that you're launching in. Are you not baking in much traction as a base case in those new geographies, or is your €10 billion euro target too low?
The second question, Christian mentioned that part of the past year 25 EBITDA margin target is coming from better marketing efficiency. What range of outcomes for marketing as a percentage of sales are you anticipating? What is the marketing efficiency like in your most mature markets? A third question, I noticed that you're currently hiring for a new venture providing a meat and fish offering to consumers in the U.S. Is that what you're referring to, the sort of new brand that you're investing in? Is that included in your 2022 revenue guidance and the EUR 140 million of negative EBITDA contribution? More conceptually, how should we think about the contribution margins of a product like that? Thanks.
Emily, very provocative questions. I think overall, right, we're usually trying to provide ranges. I think on the cross-selling opportunity, we think that can grow to 15%-20%. We only launched that last year, shortly before the Capital Markets Day. Kind of like where it should trend towards in the next, you know, four or five years. That obviously, you know, we're working with ranges here. The same when we're working with, you know, TAM expansion, the same when we're working with TAM penetration. We're always working with ranges. I think we also, you know, want to be conservative, while still showing you sort of like what all of the individual pillars could potentially contribute, what we think is possible.
Will we basically, you know, land at 120% goal achievement for each of the ranges that we provide you? Probably not. On a weighted basis, I think there is a very clear growth path how with the things that we have now set in motion around monetization and cross-selling, around TAM expansion, around TAM penetration, will get us sort of like to the EUR 10 billion target over that timeframe. It doesn't mean that we don't believe in TAM penetration upside. It definitely doesn't mean that, you know. It just doesn't mean that the 15%-20% are too high. We think all of that are likely ranges of outcome, and hopefully, the overall weighted will get us easily to the EUR 10 billion target.
Emily, on your second question, range of outcomes for marketing as percentage of revenue in the mid- and longer term.
I think back to that page, what we've shown you there is kind of a central case versus next year's level around about 2% potential. I think that's the right basis to plan with from your perspective. Now, you asked about our most mature countries where those levels sit there. In those markets, we even achieve better levels, yeah, than that guidance would imply. I would say that should be icing on the cake for you then further down the road. We obviously also may see strong opportunities to then launch again new businesses which may consume more marketing.
If you plan with the two points or thereabouts, that's, I think, a sensible assumption in the mid to long term.
The last one was around potential new venture that you heard or read about. I think there's always like a number of opportunities that we're going after. If they reach any scale or any meaningful thresholds that we think it makes sense to discuss them in more detail, then we'll definitely take that opportunity. I think, as for now, there is one of different things that we incubate internally, that we pilot, that we play around with. Whenever we feel like we have conviction and confidence that this is something that can meaningfully impact our numbers, like, you know, recently, HelloFresh Market, then we're very happy to talk about that and also outline our vision.
To the second part of your question, costs attached to that initiative are included in that guidance. Yes.
We will take our next question from Sebastian Patulea with Jefferies.
Hello, everyone. Thank you for taking my questions and thank you for the presentation. I'm trying to assess the conservatism of the guidance, and I'm following up on one or two previous questions, please. Looking at the context that your competitors have increased prices in the last quarter with retention rates much better than their data models expected, and therefore, they had revenue surprises, can you please confirm your 20%-26% growth rate that doesn't assume any price increases next year? Probably as important, are you open to the idea of increasing prices, if not next year, maybe a year from then? Feedback from peers is that they're very pleased with the results from these price increases.
The second question, does the guidance for 2022 assume any capacity bottlenecks for the first half of the year, maybe in France, Belgium, Netherlands, maybe for Factor75 as well? You're assuming a large step up in new users in the first quarter. Will you have any capacity bottlenecks in the first half of the year, please? This could show that the true underlying demand could be stronger than the headline growth you expect. Third one, can I please ask what's your visibility into the COGS line for next year? Can you hedge against labor inflation, please? Lastly, I promise, still on the conservatism of the margin, do you leave any room for error for implementation of the automation project, please, as sometimes things can go wrong or get delayed? Thank you very, very much.
On pricing and how that translates into the guidance we've been given on top line and on bottom line, at the moment, we assume that we will have broadly stable pricing and get to the 20%-26% top-line growth with only minor tweaks to our pricing model. As you know, and as we have discussed in the past, we are testing prices and price elasticities in different markets all the time. You know, we're definitely, like, evaluating what can we do, where does it make sense, what are the elasticities at the moment. But we usually only wanna talk about that ex-post and not ex-ante, not basically promise too much. That applies both to our top-line assumptions as well as to our bottom-line assumptions.
Can just reference again that for us, it's not the margin or short-term revenue outlook, but really the customer profitability lens that we wanna apply. To really understand what it does to order rate, to really understand what it does to retention usually takes a couple of months to actually be able to extrapolate that into the future. If competitors have been making moves very quickly and said they have seen very little elasticity on that, then you know in the short term, that might be. We really wanna kind of like be very prudent around how we analyze that and take a customer profitability view over their lifetime. Hope this answered your question. Christian, wanna take the second one?
Yeah, absolutely. On the average duration of our contracts, Sebastian, this really varies by category and by market. It’s not that we apply one uniform contract across our thousands of different suppliers and categories. It’s really a case-by-case basis. For some of our higher value categories, these are typically one-year contracts where there is a fair amount effectively being renewed towards the beginning of Q1 and what we consider reasonable there, we bake basically into the guidance that we provided today.
Yeah. Looking at your question regarding potential capacity bottlenecks. In the grander scheme of things, the answer is no. We will not face capacity bottlenecks. In some of the more recent geographies and across some of the more recent brands that we launched in the first half of the year, there will be some minor capacity bottlenecks as we've seen very steep growth rates throughout this year. We're also anticipating steep growth at the beginning of next year for these. We're working towards alleviating that through all sorts of short-term measures, and then we will also bring online additional capacity in the second half of the year. Your last question was on automation and sort of the room for error or the margin for error that we have there.
As Christian said before, when it comes to automation, we definitely have a lot of what we would call BAU automation that is going live. These are tested concepts. Accordingly, sort of there isn't a lot of potential for errors or things to go wrong. We have two larger pilots that are going live. First of all, these are slightly different concepts that are going live in International and in the U.S. We're not putting all eggs in one basket, and basically, we've factored all of that into our capacity planning, our business plan. Basically, there is quite a bit of room for things to go wrong, which we're obviously not expecting.
We have a very high conviction on these pilots, on the ROI they will deliver, but we're definitely not reliant on that to happen.
Thank you. We will now address some of the questions submitted via the webcast page.
Sorry. Let me read out the first one from Stéphane Soussan from CPR Asset Management. "HelloFresh already had a target to double capacity, but not with such high CapEx, EUR 500 million. Looks like capital intensity is deteriorating significantly. What has happened?" I would say that's not, from my perspective, appropriately reflecting reality. When you think about this year, we spent somewhat close to EUR 200 million. Recall that slide that Thomas had in his presentation where you see that the number of fulfillment centers, but even more importantly, the total capacity and the surface that we are creating in 2022 is also quite a bit above versus what we have added in 2021. On the like-for-like basis, it is quite comparable.
You have basically those around about EUR 200 million for automation rollout on top of that. That's really what gets you to the EUR 500 million. There's certainly no deterioration in terms of capital intensity. To put it differently, we are still very bullish about the ROI that this investment back into our business brings us here.
Another question was asked by Chet Kapoor from Tenzing. "When do you plan to open up Factor75 to your existing HelloFresh subscribers in the U.S.?" The answer is that we've been scaling Factor standalone, obviously very, very strongly, almost 3.5 times this year alone. This meant that we've been running out of capacity a couple of months ago, and we're now building or trying to build very quickly new capacity both in addition to the sites that we already have, as well as an entirely new site. I think once that new site opens up, we can start actually not only growing the Factor brand standalone, but also actually making some of that of those meals available to our HelloFresh customer base.
I don't think that this will happen before the end of 2022. I think the earliest point that this will be possible will probably be at the end of 2022. At this point, it depends a little bit on what are all the other things it competes with for our HelloFresh core brand. Certainly something that we are very excited about in the long run, because it's also one recurring theme that we hear from our customers, whether that's with regards to HelloFresh Market, we wanna have more ready-to-eat meals, or also when it comes to the menu itself, we wanna have more options that are really convenient, that allow us to spend only 10, 15, 20 minutes in the kitchen. I think to both those trends, opening up Factor to our HelloFresh customer base would just make a ton of sense.
We're excited about it, but it won't come before the end of 2022. There was a question from Jeff Hargreaves. "Please comment on recent unionization and anti-unionization press reports and the overall situation." Happy to take that question. From our perspective, we obviously prefer to work with our employees directly and not via union representation.
same time, we obviously also respect every employee's rights to choose or refuse union representation. Having said that, I think it's clear that there were two union votes basically going on, two union campaigns in our Colorado Center and in our California Center that in the beginning caught us a little bit off guard because we felt that we've actually invested a lot, not only in safety, but also a lot in very competitive compensation plans, very competitive benefits, and overall the wellbeing and labor relations in those sites. We have now worked, you know, towards resolving that. The vote in Aurora in Colorado has already come in. We have overwhelmingly won that vote, so there will not be unionization in Colorado. There is the other vote outstanding in California. I think we're also rather optimistic, but it's very early days.
That should come in over the next couple of weeks, how that vote turns out. I think overall, we can just, you know, double down on what I said in my initial remarks. We prefer to work with our employees directly, and it's a very competitive labor market. We're offering already competitive packages, and we'll obviously, you know, strive to increase our employee value proposition wherever we can. I do believe that this will also be reflected in the other vote that's coming in shortly.
Okay. I think from glancing at the questions, the other ones that have been submitted actually have been answered or asked by the research analysts on the call already, and hopefully answered as well, given that we're 15 minutes over. Dominik, time to wrap up.
Time to wrap up, yeah. Thanks a lot everyone for joining us today. We've tried to really sort of like give you a lot more context around how we think about our addressable market today, but also in the future, outlining really step-by-step the growth strategy over the next couple of years. I think 2022 is gonna be a pretty exciting year. We're gonna target another huge year of growth. We're having customer profitability that is higher than it ever was, and so we really wanna kind of like use the funds and the strong balance sheet that we have to take advantage of that opportunity, reinvest where we see good customer profitability, and where we actually see that by unbottling capacity we can improve our customer value proposition. That to me are really the main points that are out there for 2022.
Here internally, we all have very high conviction that it's gonna be another successful year for us, and that's why we wanna be firing on all cylinders to make that a reality. Thanks a lot for joining in, and I'm sure we're gonna catch up one-on-one in the near future. Thanks everyone.
Thank you.
Thank you.