How HelloFresh Protects Its Circuit Breaker Limit and Optimizes Charging Costs

HelloFresh delivers thousands of meal kits every day with a growing electric fleet. Overnight, dozens of vans stand at the logistics depot waiting to charge.

The challenge: a limited connection and moving prices

The depot's grid connection is limited, electricity prices change through the day, and every van has to be ready for its tour in the morning. Conventional charging solutions struggle to balance energy availability, operational safety and cost. Charging everything at once risks exceeding the circuit breaker limit, and the usual fix, reinforcing the grid connection, takes time and money.

What RiDERgy does at the depot

RiDERgy provides AI-based software for smart charging, energy management and peak shaving. At the HelloFresh depot it works in four ways:

• Peak shaving and load management: charging power across all vehicles is controlled centrally, so the site stays within its circuit breaker limit and expensive demand peaks are avoided.
• Need-based prioritization: charging follows departure times and each vehicle's actual energy need, not the order in which vans arrive.
• Spot price optimization in 15-minute steps: the software reads next-day wholesale prices and moves charging into the cheapest periods, which lowers energy procurement costs while respecting operational routines.
• Software only: it runs in the cloud and needs no extra hardware, which simplifies the rollout and keeps the workload for depot IT low.

More than basic load management

RiDERgy is a partner for the long run, not a simple load manager. The software learns from the depot's own data over time, so its planning keeps getting better the longer it runs.

It also grows with the site. Other loads can be added to the same optimization, and with PV and batteries on site, RiDERgy can optimize the whole energy flow of the depot, not only the vehicles.

The setup in numbers

The depot runs 77 AC charge points plus some DC charge points, with 40 to 65 vehicles in daily operation. Every vehicle stays reliably charged and starts each morning on time and fully charged.

What HelloFresh says

“What convinces us most is the combination of technical know-how, innovative strength and a clear understanding of operational requirements.”

Pierre Rudolph, Senior Fleet Manager Logistic DACH, HelloFresh

What comes next

The setup also lays the groundwork for future features such as bidirectional charging and energy management across multiple sites.

Want to see this on your fleet? Book a demo.