Recipe box company HelloFresh has been fined for sending millions of spam texts and emails to customers.

The food delivery firm was ordered to pay £140,000, following a 2022 investigation by the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), as reported by the BBC.

And the fine should serve as a stark warning to other businesses.

The investigation found HelloFresh sent 79 million emails and a million texts over the course of seven months. The ICO said the campaign was a "clear breach of trust."

The company said it had since made changes to its email and SMS policy.

Fourteen complaints about HelloFresh were made directly to the regulator and another 8,729 were made to 7726, Ofcom's spam message reporting service.

The ICO's investigations found the company continued to contact some people even after they had asked it to stop.

Investigations also showed that it wasn't made clear enough to customers by HelloFresh that their data would be used for marketing for up to 24 months after cancelling their subscriptions.

The ICO said customers were "hit with a barrage of marketing texts they didn't want or expect".

The fine serves as a warning to other business that the ICO will take action if the law to protect the right of customers to choose how their data is used isn't being followed.

The ICO reiterated that anyone being contacted by nuisance texts, calls or emails from any business should report them straightaway.