HelloFresh · Meal-kit subscription · Dark posting at scale · 2026
How HelloFresh ran creator content in 17 countries at once
Localisation is usually treated as translation. In creator marketing it is casting.
17
countries
localised creator content
The results, up top — every number is in the strip below
17
countries
localised creator content in each
100+
local creators
market-native, not translated
20%
reduction in CPA
month over month
40%
increase in referral sign-ups
a second-order creator effect
Multi-7-figure
programme scale
dark posting at volume
01 — The challenge
One offer, seventeen markets, and no shared cultural reference.
Meal kits are sold on what a household actually eats, which is the least transferable thing between countries. A single global creative set will always underperform in most markets.
Producing bespoke work per market, however, usually breaks the economics.
“Food is the one category where a global ad is almost guaranteed to feel foreign somewhere. What sells dinner in Berlin does not sell dinner in Dallas.”
The programme solved it with local creators and a dark-posting structure built for volume.
02 — Our approach
Local creators, dark posting, and referral as a second lever.
More than 100 local creators produced market-native content, so each country ran creative made by someone who eats there. Dark posting kept the volume manageable: hundreds of variants ran as paid without turning brand pages into a feed of ads.
Referral sign-ups were tracked as a parallel outcome and rose 40%, which is the effect creator content tends to have that paid dashboards miss.
03 — What we did
What the campaign actually consisted of.
The working parts behind the HelloFresh numbers above.
100+ local creators
Casting as localisation
Each market ran creative produced by creators from that market rather than translated assets.
Creator asset grid
Dark posting structure
Volume without page clutter
Variants ran as dark posts, allowing far more creative in-market at once.
Creative from the campaign
CPA down 20% MoM
Efficiency compounding month over month
Cost per acquisition fell 20% month over month as winners were identified faster.
Reported campaign metrics
Referral up 40%
The second-order effect
Referral sign-ups rose 40%, an outcome creator content drives and paid reporting usually under-credits.
Reported referral metrics
The stack we ran it on
Meta Ads Manager
Paid social
TikTok Ads Manager
Paid social
Creator sourcing
Casting
Spark Ads & whitelisting
Amplification
Frame.io
Creative review
Canva
Creative
GA4
Analytics
Looker Studio
Dashboards
“Web Tonic did in six weeks what our last two agencies couldn't in a year — and for the first time we could see every dollar of it”
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