Governing at Hyper-Growth: How HelloFresh Cut Data Access from Days to Minutes with Unity Catalog

At HelloFresh, speed is our currency. But with 70,000+ tables generated across decentralized domains, our rapid growth threatened to outpace our ability to govern it. We reached a critical inflection point where the "data mesh" approach began to look like a "data mess"—fragmented across AWS Glue, obscured by complex IAM policies, and creating bottlenecks where data access took days to approve.This session unpacks the strategic pivot from reactive catalog management to a unified, scalable governance model on Databricks Unity Catalog. We will move beyond the technical migration to discuss the architectural shifts required to balance autonomy with control. You will learn how we dismantled the trade-off between security and agility, replacing brittle object-based permissions with a streamlined privilege model that empowers data owners.We will share our blueprint for a zero-downtime migration (using Hive Metastore Federation) and the cultural changes required to make governance stick.