NEWARK — Popular international meal delivery company HelloFresh has found two new homes in Newark, bringing hundreds of jobs with it.
The company has opened a 350,000-square-foot distribution center in Newark’s East Ferry neighborhood, near the Passaic River and the New Jersey Turnpike, and a 13,000-square-foot customer care call center downtown.
HelloFresh customers subscribe online, choosing the type of food they want, how much and on what day each week they want it to arrive. The company pre-measures the ingredients and ships them with recipe cards to customers’ doorsteps.
Here are five things to know about HelloFresh’s new facilities in Newark:
1. The distribution center on Lister Avenue employs 240 people, 200 of whom are hourly and 40 of whom are salaried. Newark residents make up 23 percent of the distribution center’s employees.
2. About 140 people, 26 percent of whom live in Newark, work in the customer care call center at Gateway Center.
3. HelloFresh plans to hire about 50 more employees at its Newark locations in the next month.
4. The company had operated a warehouse in Linden since early 2015, but moved to Newark for more space. A spokeswoman for HelloFresh said the switch was unrelated to competitor Blue Apron’s anticipated move to Linden this year.
5. Inside the facility, food delivered by suppliers first passes through a quality control room. Anything the company doesn’t want to use is either sent back to the suppliers or donated to Englewood Cliffs-based nonprofit Table to Table, which brings food to organizations that serve the hungry. The rest of the items delivered to HelloFresh pass through assembly lines and land in boxes that get shipped to customers’ homes via FedEx or UPS.
Marisa Iati may be reached at miati@njadvancemedia.com . Follow her on Twitter@Marisa_Iati or on Facebook here . Find NJ.com on Facebook .
