HelloFresh’s Brownfield Leap: One App to Feed Them All!
Article Summary
HelloFresh was running 6 mobile apps on 2 completely different tech stacks. Their teams couldn't ship features fast enough, and customers were getting inconsistent experiences across brands.
The HelloFresh engineering team tackled this fragmentation head-on with Project PUMA (Unified Mobile App). Instead of a risky full rewrite, they chose a brownfield React Native approach to progressively unify their apps while keeping critical native functionality intact.
Key Takeaways
- Consolidated native Swift/Kotlin and React Native codebases into one brownfield architecture
- Launched new Factor app in Sept 2025 using hybrid native/React Native approach
- Expect 3x faster feature delivery across all 6 apps by end of 2025
- Built internal React Native training program with GenAI-assisted learning for rapid upskilling
- Reduced engineering duplication while maintaining brand-specific customization capabilities
HelloFresh unified 6 mobile apps serving millions of users across multiple brands without a risky rewrite, positioning themselves to ship features 3x faster.
About This Article
HelloFresh Group's meal kit brands used native Swift and Kotlin while their RTE brands ran React Native. This split meant duplicate engineering work and made it nearly impossible to keep features consistent across their portfolio of apps serving millions of users worldwide.
In Q4 2024, Arbaaz Dossani's team created a Shared Modules repository that lets React Native features work in native apps without rewriting the code. They also launched an internal React Native training program powered by GenAI to help engineers learn faster.
HelloFresh expects to ship core features across all 6 mobile apps about 3 times faster by the end of 2025 compared to 2024. The Factor app has already been using this hybrid approach since September 2025.