Primal Gourmet Order Experience
Role
Strategy, UI/UX Design, Research
Company
DMDC & krumware
Timeframe
Summer 2017
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.
Problem
Primal Gourmet needed an improved automated, streamlined online system to serve their products to customers faster and more accurately in order to free up Greg’s time for further business development and growth.
Challenges
Customers had to pay for (4) full weeks of meals up front for Greg’s old model (suspected barrier to entry for some potential customers)
Customers were putting allergy concerns, preferential substitutions, and various other customizations to their meal pack in one large “Comments” field at the end of the checkout process, causing substantial back/forth weekly (~15 emails per 100 orders)
Greg’s detailed spreadsheet system for tracking customers subscriptions & 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.
Existing 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.
Existing manual process gave Greg no ability to take a vacation or sick day when processing meals, which left Greg stretched thin and exhausted.
Explorations
Restructured the subscription model (doing away with the 4-week pay in-advance model—costly entry barrier 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.
Partnered with krumware’s engineering team 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 (no matter how many thousands of orders)
Outcome
Increased web sales by 43.8% in first year
Reduced order processing time by ~75% (from 8h to 2h weekly)
Reduced order errors from 8% to ~2.5% through automation and reducing unnecessary manual interactions
Dramatically reduced processing time afforded Greg opportunity to open new 5000sqft facility a year after site launch
Emails from customers clarifying order dropped by 65% (from 15 per hundred orders to below 5) due to redesigning order options
