The takeaway: Tanner Morley runs final-mile parcel delivery for HelloFresh, the country's largest perishable subscription brand. Twenty-five years in logistics, four at HelloFresh. He has shipped under the tightest constraints imaginable: food that has to arrive on a specific day, in a specific window, with a customer's family planning meals around it. In a 43-minute conversation on the Retail Control Tower podcast, Tanner laid out how HelloFresh moved from a small-carrier-set network to a diversified, multi-partner mix. The shorthand version is below. The full quotes are in his voice.
The premise
When you're shipping perishables on a subscription cadence, you don't get the luxury of an acceptable failure rate. A late box isn't a customer service ticket. It's a family that doesn't have dinner. That constraint reframes every carrier decision: cost, service tier, peak capacity, redundancy. HelloFresh moves a lot of boxes every week under those terms, which means Tanner's playbook is more aggressive on diversification than most enterprise shippers will need. The principles still translate.
What HelloFresh ships, and why it matters for the carrier conversation
I've spent about 25 years in the logistics space. Started in warehousing, courier, spent time in rail and intermodal. Most recently joined HelloFresh about four years ago, and I manage final mile parcel delivery for a perishable product across a diversified mix of carriers. — Tanner Morley
Perishable means a single missed delivery day is a customer-experience event. Subscription means the cycle repeats next week, so the brand impact compounds. That's the lens for everything that follows.
How HelloFresh structures the carrier portfolio
The starting point isn't cost. It's three constraints stacked on top of each other: can a box get there, can it get there on the right day, can it get there at a price that pencils. Tanner frames it as a reliability-first carrier mix with diversification as a quiet but constant thread underneath.
Our carrier mix is all based on reliability, consistency, but there's an underlying thread of diversification in way of ensuring that a customer doesn't have a delivered-not-received package, that they're able to get special instructions, that they're able to get the photo proof of delivery that they would expect.
Diversification isn't about chasing the cheapest lane. It's about making sure no single carrier failure becomes a customer-experience failure.
The case for redundancy: the cost you don't see until you need it
Most shippers can rattle off the cost of adding a carrier. Fewer can articulate the cost of not adding one. Tanner's framing here is the line every CFO should hear before they sign off on a single-source network.
Lack of redundancy in a specific area is a big one for us. If you don't have multiple options to service that same box, your exposure to risk increases. And there's a very definite cost to that. May not be an immediate cost, but that's a cost that you don't want to be exposed to without very heavy consideration and mitigation.
There's also a second-order cost on the over-diversification side: leverage. Spreading volume too thin destroys the relationship value with your strongest partners.
How HelloFresh evaluates a new carrier
Tanner doesn't add carriers on a whim. He keeps a working Rolodex of carriers, talks to new ones regularly to understand coverage and capability, but the bar to actually onboard is high. Cultural fit, operational compatibility, and the specific package profile fit all have to clear.
Adding a carrier is definitely not a willy-nilly type of situation. We're very diligent about making sure that we have a right fit, both culturally and the way that we operate.
The validation sequence:
- Hard requirements. Service type and coverage match. Manifest integration. Tracking event format. Most carriers clear these baseline gates.
- External signal. Analyst scorecards. Reddit cruising. The aggregate sentiment from the population that actually receives that carrier's deliveries.
- Structured volume testing. The only way to know.
The only way that you're going to get a solid understanding of how they'll perform for your specific package profile is by giving them some volume. So structured testing.
The Reddit point is one most carrier evaluations skip. Aggregate consumer sentiment is a leading indicator no analyst report captures.
Peak capacity: the conversation you should be having year-round
Peak season planning at HelloFresh isn't a Q3 fire drill. It's a continuous review.
It's actually one of those things that in the supply chain, especially parcel, it's a never-ending conversation. Like it's a constant year-round review and planning because every peak period brings its own challenges and they're often unique.
The list of things that move peak shape varies wildly: pre-tariff inventory pulls, winter storms (impact depends on the year), the calendar gap between Thanksgiving and Christmas. HelloFresh has the added pressure of being a subscription. The shipping never stops.
The operational answer Tanner reaches for is contracts.
Contracts are one of those things that really do define and secure those relationships. If you're a shipper that has an influx of capacity requirements during that time, you want to have that added to a contract to make sure that you're protected.
If you're an enterprise shipper without a capacity clause in your peak contract, you're hoping. Tanner's team doesn't hope.
The partnership view: vendor or partner?
Most carrier playbooks treat the carrier as a vendor. Tanner doesn't.
It's a piece that a lot of people don't think about. The partnership is a two-way street. Yes, they're a vendor and they're providing a service. But the better that you can help them be successful, the more positive outcome you're going to get from that relationship.
Carriers have finite delivery hours. They're running their own S&OP, allocating capacity across thousands of shipper accounts. Surprises hurt them. Visibility into your forecast helps them and gets you better service in return.
The counterintuitive finding on national vs. regional
The conventional wisdom is that national carriers are higher quality because they're national. Tanner has found the opposite, at least for HelloFresh's perishable use case.
A lot of times the conversation is around 'you know, the known quantity, you get higher quality when you go with that route versus a smaller regional.' And we found that to be counterintuitive there. Or opposite of our experience. Those networks are not able to provide the highest levels of service and they come at a premium cost because you're supporting all of the infrastructure that they've built out over the years.
The national carriers are reliable in the aggregate sense (law of large numbers), but the acceptable failures baked into their networks become unacceptable for a perishable shipper. Regionals, for HelloFresh's profile, hit higher service standards.
This generalizes more than people think. If your service quality dispersion matters more than your floor pricing, the case for regionals is stronger than the conventional take.
Carrier governance: scorecards and weekly performance reviews
Most shippers, especially early in their diversification journey, manage carrier performance by shifting volume. Box performance is bad in Pittsburgh on Carrier A, so it goes to Carrier B. Tanner calls this what it is.
It's a costly way to manage. It makes it more difficult to follow your strategy and hit tiers. And a lot of times it hides the faults. It's sweeping the problems under the rug so you never actually get to the root cause.
HelloFresh runs a carrier scorecard with weekly performance syncs and an open feedback channel. Some carrier partners have established performance management practices. Others learn the muscle on the job with HelloFresh's team.
We have established a baseline and we do send out, 'hey, based on the boxes that we gave you, this is our expectations, this is how you're performing, this area has an opportunity.' And then we work together collaboratively to solve those problems. And sometimes it's us, sometimes it's them.
The sometimes-it's-us part is the half most shippers skip. The audit and analytics work ShipScience customers run regularly surfaces the same finding: a meaningful share of carrier service issues trace back to internal operations (label quality, dock loading, manifest accuracy) before they trace back to the carrier.
Carrier diversification is a multi-year directional move
The biggest myth Tanner cuts through: that you can diversify a carrier mix quickly. You can't.
A longer-term strategy is always going to be more cost-effective than a short-term strategy. If you're thinking about diversifying a carrier mix, a lot of times that is something that you do as part of a multi-year directional move. It's not something that one week you decide 'I'm no longer a single-source shipper and now I've got five carriers in my mix.' You want to plan towards it. You want to fully understand the implications of what it does to your contract. You want to time it to expirations of terms.
National carrier contracts run 50+ pages of boilerplate. Tanner's point: there are clauses in there that auto-disqualify some of the moves you might want to make. Read them before you embark.
On packaging and the cost of a single late delivery
Final mile parcel delivery, that's where the rubber meets the road. That's the last step, the last impression that your brand is leaving on that customer.
HelloFresh packages every box for an extra day of transit. Even at 99% on-time, the 1% has to survive. The financial framing is total-cost-of-shipment, not invoice cost. The cost of attrition, the cost of brand perception damage, the cost of customer-acquisition spent acquiring a customer who churns over a delivery failure: all of it gets quantified.
Maybe we're in a better spot than some smaller shippers to truly be able to quantify and understand what is the cost of a delay of a box being delivered a day late. What is the cost of a box going completely undelivered? Does it increase attrition? Does it overall damage the brand? We measure a lot of that. But ultimately that's true for every shipper. You just may not fully quantify exactly where those costs are. But they're higher than people think.
What Tanner would do differently if he started from scratch
Asked the open-palette question (designing the network from zero today), Tanner's answer is honest.
I'm not positive. At four years with HelloFresh now, I feel like we have done a lot to completely reshape our carrier network into a vision that I can get behind. Would I have designed a higher redundancy network to begin with? Yes. Would I have negotiated fuel surcharge caps into my contracts? Yes. Would I have been careful about variability and seasonality and made sure that we were protected against whatever might happen? Yes.
Fuel surcharge caps and seasonality protections are line items most contracts don't have until someone's been burned. They're cheap to add at renewal. They're not cheap when they're missing.
The tooling argument: it's easier now than it's ever been
I would go so far as to say that it's easier to do now than it has been in the past. With the proliferation of generative AI, with the resources that you have as far as audit and oversight and performance, you don't need a team of a hundred logistics analysts anymore.
This was Tanner's closing point, and it lines up with what we see at ShipScience. The barriers to running a diversified, well-audited, contract-aware parcel program have collapsed. The shippers who'll win the next three years are the ones who treat the carrier portfolio as an active asset rather than a static configuration.
How this maps to your network
Five takeaways for any enterprise shipper:
- Redundancy has a cost. So does single-source. Both are real. Quantify both before you decide.
- Add carriers slowly, with structured testing. Reddit sentiment plus analyst scorecards plus a small volume pilot is the right sequence.
- Make peak a year-round conversation. Get capacity into your contract before peak hits, not during.
- Treat carriers as partners, not vendors. Share your forecasts. Take their feedback. Run a scorecard.
- Diversification is a multi-year strategy, not a campaign. Plan to renewal cycles. Read your boilerplate.
If your network isn't where Tanner's is, the work starts with a contract review and a service-quality scorecard. Our Parcel Refund Index Q2 2026 is a useful audit baseline to anchor that work, and the Complete Guide to Parcel Audit covers the operational categories most shippers find first.
If you want to hear the full 43-minute conversation with Tanner, the Retail Control Tower podcast is on every major platform. This was Episode 1.
Anthony Robinson is the founder and CEO of ShipScience. Tanner Morley is the head of final-mile parcel at HelloFresh. This conversation is the inaugural episode of the Retail Control Tower podcast.
