Fresh Fitness Food

What if you could get meals customized for your micro-nutrient and caloric needs delivered every day?

A business model built around food can be very, very hard to scale. Now imagine how complicated things can get when every meal has to be customized to the unique dietary needs of thousands of Londoners on a daily basis. This is the challenge Fresh Fitness Food (FFF) came to us with. 

At Calcey, we think like product owners. Having uncovered FFF’s global ambitions during our initial consultations and collaborative workshops, scalability and future-proofing quickly became vital decision making criteria.

Built from the ground up, to suit real business needs

In order to deliver bespoke meals, FFF gathers data on the dietary preferences and nutrition needs of each individual customer. While the platform is capable of estimating caloric requirements based on a set of predefined attributes, we also built a nutrition calculator for FFF’s customers to use. This data is then used to put together a varied meal plan (because who wants to eat the same thing everyday?). Once the meal plan is in place, each meal is cooked, packaged, and delivered on time.

We engineered a custom ERP system that automated the entire workflow starting with customer onboarding right through to delivery and billing. Included in the ERP is a custom algorithm whose job it is to optimise costs and help FFF achieve economies of scale, while providing each and every customer with a variety of bespoke meals that cover all their macronutrient needs and also account for their unique diets (keto, vegan, paleo etc.), allergies, and other preferences.

We also helped FFF increase its customer retention. A fast, but well-planned and executed overhaul of the customer portal saw FFF’s customers being given the opportunity to manage and schedule their meals. We simultaneously built customer relationship management tools so that FFF could track and nurture customers in different ways based on their position in the customer lifecycle.

A quick pay-off

Investments in technology can sometimes take a little time to bear fruit, but in the case of FFF, results were almost instant. The launch of the mini-ERP saw net margins improve by 14% while the speed at which meal templates and new customer profiles were processed increased tenfold.

That’s not all. We have since gone on to launch a brand new mobile app on behalf of FFF, through which the company’s customers can set their nutrition goals, log their meals, and track their macronutrient intake in real time. With smartphones becoming an extension of our lives, the app is more than just a simple port of the web portal. We’ve worked hard to add features like activity tracking (through Apple Health and FitBit-connected wearables), recipe recommendations, and intelligent guided workouts that adjust a user’s recommended daily caloric intake based on their workouts. This increases the precision with which FFF can customise meals to suit a customer. 

More importantly though, by building in a comprehensive set of features, we are helping FFF attract a whole new cohort of customers who wish to manage all aspects of their fitness through one single, uncomplicated app.

Enabling easy scalability

More recently, FFF decided to opt for a franchising model so that it could quickly expand into more cities in Europe. Given the business model, each franchisee in a city needed access to a dedicated admin panel, a database, CRM capabilities, dedicated food logs, and more. From FFF’s position as the franchiser, onboarding a new franchisee and setting up had to be quick and easy.

Over 8 months, our engineering team worked tirelessly to design and launch a product that ticked all these boxes. Their success means that FFF can now come to a city near you more easily, be it Amsterdam, Berlin, or Madrid.

Here are a few more interesting reads on our work with FFF:

• London’s leading precision nutrition service goes Mobile! Here’s how Calcey made it happen
• Transforming Businesses On A Budget With AWS Lambda
• Resolving data sync inconsistencies in calorie counts and energy expenditure that arise with Apple Health integrations
• A behind the scenes look at building an end-to-end platform for London’s leading precision nutrition start-up