Primal Gourmet order experience

Role: Creative Direction, UI/UX Design, UX Research
Team: DMDC & krumware
Customer: Primal Gourmet
Timeframe: Summer 2017

Synopsis

Chef Greg Martin, owner of Primal Gourmet, a meal prep and delivery service in the Columbia area, had an existing meal order website that proved his concept was successful, but took an excessive amount of time to manage. I worked with Greg to develop a new eCommerce system and infrastructure to solve existing problems and get Greg’s time back to focus on other growth for his business.

Background

Chef Greg Martin of Primal Gourmet in Columbia, SC had an online meal order delivery/pickup system based on an existing Square site. He had customers on a “Primal Plan” where they would pay for 4 weeks up front ($160) and would get those meals prepped and ready to pickup on Tuesday every week. He had no software system of handling this and resorted to a very organized, yet complex, and time-consuming spreadsheet (which had some margin for human error). This process required anywhere from 6-10 hours every Monday of Chef Greg’s time. This included task which he wasn’t able to decouple from in this process like: counting weekly meals, identifying who was on their last week of their Primal Plan, labeling specific allergy concerns & pack customizations, and then labeling meals and packages for orders. I worked with Greg to streamline this process, get time back in his day, and reduce the hands-on need for managing this (as well as dropping potential for error).

Problem

Primal Gourmet needed an automated, streamlined online system to better serve their products to customers in order to free up Greg’s time for further business management and development. Some of the major problems identified in initial talks & research were:

• Customers had to pay for (4) full weeks of meals up front for Greg’s old model (suspected barrier to entry for some new, potential customers)

• Customers were putting allergy concerns, preferential substitutions, and various other customizations to their meal pack in one large “Notes” field at the end of the checkout process, causing substantial back/forth weekly (~15 emails per 100 orders)

• Greg’s detailed system for tracking customers meals often took his entire Monday every week. On the busiest weeks, they had 250 orders (of 5 meals each) which became unscalable and overwhelming to manually process.

• Susceptible to human error. Part of the process included manually writing & labeling individual meal lids with order details so they could prepare and identify meals when packing. 

Goals

Build an easier to understand platform to order meals from that took less hands-on processing and increased order accuracy. While increased sales/orders was an expected bonus, it was a secondary goal based on Primal Gourmet’s needs.

Process

• We restructured the subscription model, doing away with the 4-week pay in-advance model (a costly barrier for entry for customers), and replaced it with a weekly automated subscription plan that allowed users to manage their subscription as needed.

• We restructured Product Pages by adding new option categories: Product Type, Allergy, and Preference options to allow customers to build their meals (instead of the large ‘Notes’ section that caused excessive back/forth and order errors). We defined these categories based on audits of all previous orders in Primal Gourmet history.

• Worked with Hunter at krumware to build an order export process tool, allowing Greg to run reports for orders on Monday AM so his team can prepare accurate amounts without manual counting and tallying.