£140,000

Penalty imposed

PECR 2003

12 January 2024

Date on the register

PECR 2003

Law relied on

PECR regulation 20

Retail and manufacture

Sector

5 actions on the register

In one line

The ICO fined Grocery Delivery E-Services UK Ltd t/a HelloFresh £140,000 on 12 January 2024 under the UK marketing rules in PECR. This is an ICO penalty, not a GDPR fine.

01The record

Organisation named: Grocery Delivery E-Services UK Ltd t/a HelloFresh
Action: Monetary penalty
Date published: 12 January 2024
Register year: 2024
Law relied on: PECR 2003
Provisions cited: PECR regulation 20
Penalty: £140,000
Sector on the register: Retail and manufacture
ICO register reference: 17329
Register status: Published on the ICO enforcement register, 4 September 2026
Notice documents: 1 PDF published by the ICO
Sector share of register: 5 of 216 actions (2%)
Actions published that year: 52
Actions under this law: 87
Position on the register: 113th of 216, oldest first
Published the same day: This entry alone
Rank by penalty size: 18th of 44 penalties with a published figure

02What happened, and where it sits

Grocery Delivery E-Services UK Ltd t/a HelloFresh received an ICO monetary penalty on 12 January 2024. The Commissioner acted under the Privacy and Electronic Communications (EC Directive) Regulations 2003, citing PECR regulation 20. A fine. The ICO issues a monetary penalty notice setting out the contravention and the sum payable. PECR is a separate instrument from the UK GDPR, so this is an ICO penalty under the marketing rules and not a GDPR fine.

The penalty is £140,000. That is the 18th largest of the 44 penalties on this register with a published figure and the 4th largest of the 13 recorded in 2024. PECR penalties are capped at £500,000, so the figure sits against that ceiling rather than the UK GDPR maximum.

Grocery Delivery E-Services UK Ltd t/a HelloFresh is filed under Retail and manufacture, which accounts for 5 of the 216 actions on the register (2%). In 2024 the ICO published 52 enforcement actions in total, 17 of them monetary penalties. 87 actions on the register name PECR 2003.

Counted from the oldest entry forward, this is the 113th of 216 actions on the register and the 3rd of 5 in Retail and manufacture. The ICO publishes one document for this action, 500 KB in total: "Hello-Fresh-MPN-20240110". It is the authority for everything on this page.

03The ICO's own account

The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has fined food delivery company HelloFresh £140,000 for a campaign of 79 million spam emails and 1 million spam texts over a seven-month period. The marketing messages were sent based on an opt-in statement which did not make any reference to the sending of marketing via text, and which was also bundled with an age confirmation statement which was likely to unfairly incentivise customers to agree. Customers were also not given sufficient information that their data would continue to be used for marketing purposes for up to 24 months after cancelling their subscriptions.

Quoted from the ICO's published register entry (ico.org.uk), Open Government Licence v3.0.

The law behind this action

PECR 2003

PECR governs electronic marketing, cookies and communications-service security. It is a separate instrument from the UK GDPR: an action taken under PECR is not a GDPR fine, and the register pages here never describe it as one.

All 87 register actions under PECR 2003

What a monetary penalty does

A fine. The ICO issues a monetary penalty notice setting out the contravention and the sum payable.

Published notice

PDFHello-Fresh-MPN-20240110(500 KB)

04Nearest entries on the register

Closest by sector, law and date
Organisation	Date	Action	Law	Penalty	Sector
Coastal Windows & Conservatories (UK) Limited	15 Aug 2024	Monetary penalty	PECR 2003	-	Retail and manufacture
It's OK Limited	15 Feb 2023	Monetary penalty	PECR 2003	-	Retail and manufacture
Coastal Windows & Conservatories (UK) Limited	15 Aug 2024	Enforcement notice	PECR 2003	-	Retail and manufacture
It's OK Limited	15 Feb 2023	Enforcement notice	PECR 2003	-	Retail and manufacture
Poxell Ltd	16 Jan 2024	Monetary penalty	PECR 2003	-	Sector not stated

All Retail and manufacture actions/All 2024 actions/The full register

05Work out an exposure of your own

Article 83 fine calculator

Estimate upper and lower tier exposure from turnover and infringement type, on the same scale the ICO works to.

How a fine is calculated

The Article 83(2) factors, the turnover caps, and how a regulator gets from a contravention to a number.

The ICO profile

How the UK regulator works post-Brexit, the £17.5M and £8.7M UK GDPR caps, and its divergence from the EU regime.

Provenance and independence

Source: ICO enforcement register (ico.org.uk/action-weve-taken/enforcement/), as published on 4 September 2026. Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.

GDPRFine.com is an independent tracker of ICO enforcement. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by or connected to the Information Commissioner's Office, and it uses no ICO branding. Where the ICO's own wording is reproduced it is quoted and attributed; everything else on these pages is our own summary of the published record.

The ICO's register held 222 entries on that date. 6 of them are prosecutions of named individuals, with ages and home towns in the ICO's own summary. This tracker indexes organisations, so those 6 are excluded and every count on these pages is out of 216. They remain on the ICO's own register.

An entry says what the Commissioner did on the date shown. It is not a statement about the organisation today, and the ICO can amend or remove a register entry at any time. Amounts and provisions are as published by the ICO; where the published notice does not state a figure or name a provision, these pages say so rather than filling the gap. This entry was read from the register page at https://ico.org.uk/action-weve-taken/enforcement/2024/01/grocery-delivery-e-services-uk-ltd-ta-hellofresh/.