Fresh Fitness Food (FFF) offers bespoke meals delivered to‑door daily, in London and several other city centers in the UK. Through personalized (macro-specific) meal plans, FFF gives its subscribers the exact nutrition they need on a daily basis, providing the precision, structure, and consistency needed to achieve their fitness goals.
Having enjoyed steady growth since launch, last year saw FFF delivering around 60,000 meals a month. Its website and backend solutions at the time could barely support this volume of orders, but FFF already had plans to grow in the UK and go international via a franchising model. Hence, while upgrading its web platform – FFF also wanted to digitize several manual processes and tasks done via a number of disjointed tools. The intent was to make its operations standardized and scalable while creating a proprietary technology platform that would transition it from meal delivery into a technology company.
While searching for a technology partner FFF was introduced to Calcey by one of Calcey’s long-standing clients in London. Calcey’s long list of clients in the food-tech and fit-tech space in London made a convincing case that they had finally found the right partner.
FFFs’ CEO Caspar and Emma who played the role of product owner for the new web portal traveled to Colombo to participate in a ‘design and discovery’ workshop to kick off the project. During this intense week-long workshop they gave the Calcey team a crash course in the intricacies of their business model and brainstormed how the new digital platform could help FFF on-board, service and retain customers with greater efficiency.
Fast-forward 9 months, FFF’s brand new web portal is now live and accepting orders! Calcey’s team built, tested the solution and completed the migration of FFF’s legacy data, which involved parsing data from several sources together to form complete client records, just in time for FFF to launch an integration with F45 and face its busiest season of the year with confidence.
The cloud-based solution that Calcey delivered for FFF combines enterprise resource planning (ERP) capabilities with a customer relationship management (CRM) system. All recipes for food to be cooked, along with attached nutritional values are maintained within the solution. Similarly, all client records from their postcodes to fitness goals, nutritional needs, exclusions (due to preferred diet or allergies), and meal delivery schedules are managed within the web portal. Limiting the variety of meals cooked on a daily basis is key to FFF’s cost efficiency. However, this has to be done without overly repeating the same food types and taking into account the individual nutritional needs and exclusions of every user. Taking all of these constraints into account to arrive at meals to be served to a specific user on a daily basis or ‘meal balancing’ as it’s known at FFF, traditionally required a team of nutritionists. Today the bulk of this work is done via an algorithm. After balancing the meals the solution creates a ‘cooking sheet’ stipulating food items and quantities to be cooked, a ‘labeling sheet’ setting out how portions should be customized for each user and a ‘shopping sheet’ listing down inventory to be purchased, on a daily basis. Finally, a delivery manifest is generated with precise instructions for delivery staff. A true end-to-end solution indeed or as FFF’s CEO puts it “a truly spectacular piece of software that works beautifully!”.
The new web portal had an immediate impact on FFF’s bottom line, improving its direct margin for food, staff and packaging costs by 14% within just 2 months of launch.