Foodstudio

Exclusively designed for ready-to-eat meal companies, FoodStudio provides a seamless and automated experience. I crafted a platform that caters to the needs of these businesses, the brand’s identity, website and print collaterals.

Scope

Problem

While collaborating with a private equity firm, we had as partners multiple ready-to-eat meal companies and eventually came to realise that although the niche was in expansion, many small and medium businesses suffered with repeating issues when it came to customer experience and digital automation, causing over 50% of food online services to fail within 16 months or less. With our tech-focused expertise, we knew a suite of digital tools was needed to address these issues and FoodStudio was born.

Goals:

Streamline Production:

Develop a user-friendly management experience from supplies ordering to meal production. Improve kitchen efficiency to reduce ingredients wastage, incidents and labour costs.

Improve Delivery Coordination:

Implement an integrated delivery tracking system to improve visibility and documentation, with potencial to enhance customer experience and reduce customer service issues.

Enable Customer Engagement:

Build a robust system to gather valuable metrics and qualitative data, to enable customer understanding and allow for better engagement strategies as well as swift reaction timing, avoiding churn.

Process

During the discovery phase, I interviewed the staff from the meal companies we had as partners and analysed their current tools and methods to understand pain points and user needs. I realised that specific areas of their work faced different issues, and specific staff members groups had each one their own requirements. FoodStudio then, was divided in multiple modules, to cover the needs from management, production and delivery. Starting from the management module, I went from wireframes to prototypes to build a complete dashboard with all relevant metrics to that type of user, focusing on cohesive data visualisation.

Collaborating closely with kitchen and delivery staff, we worked through feedback loops to build the production and delivery modules that were aimed at ease of use and intuitive navigation. The graphical interface was responsive, but was optimised for tablet devices, that were proven to be ideal for the kitchen dynamic environment. Once the initial build had been conceived, I ran tests with the production personnel on tasks such as adding and updating recipes, cooking tracking and incident reporting, until all features required were proven functional.

Results

1. Streamlined Production:

Each meal listed on the FoodStudio system contains its ingredients list in quantities needed for a single unit. After all customers’ orders are closed for a delivery day, the system multiplies the quantity of each ingredient and generates an automated purchase order for all necessary supplies. Once in the kitchen, the quantity of ingredients for preparation are listed accordingly to each batch, so the outcome will be the expected number of meals with optimal usage of supplies. Kitchen personnel can access an auto generated list of tasks for each day of work and during preparation, the app tracks the time spent on each task to assist on incidents identification and resolution while optimising kitchen labour costs.

2. Enhanced Delivery Coordination:

FoodStudio also offers a delivery driver app that is integrated with the management system and provides the company with real-time tracking and reports. On the driver’s end, it features map navigation, a list of locations optimised for trip efficiency and the ability to upload proof of delivery that unlocks the next address. Both company and end customer can visualise the photo proof to assist on contextualising any support requests regarding delivery.

3. Improved Customer Engagement:

Using a standardised ordering system, consumers can add their taste preferences, health goals and leave feedback on meals they’ve tried. This allows the company to gather valuable data from their consumer base to continually improve service and retention strategy. Menu updating is straightforward and user friendly, and will automatically rebuild the ingredient list for upcoming purchase orders and kitchen tasks. Through this feature, companies can keep users engaged with product variety or quickly react to any negative trends. In addition, the FoodStudio dashboard displays a comprehensive view of key metrics and KPIs, enabling data-driven decision-making.