Background
Fresh Fitness Food (FFF) offers bespoke meals delivered to‑door daily, in London and 10 other city centers in the UK. Through personalized (macro specific) meal plans, FFF gives its subscribers the precision, structure, and consistency needed to achieve their health and fitness goals.
Challenge
Having enjoyed steep growth since launch, FFF was delivering around 60,000 meals a month and needed to overhaul its initial website which was creaking under this volume. While upgrading its technology – it also wanted to digitize several processes that were being done manually or via excel, to make overall operations more efficient and scalable, readying the company for its next phase of explosive growth.
Calcey was already active in the food tech space in London and was recommended to FFF by a client, while it was searching for a partner to build a new digital platform.
Requirement Elaboration
The very first challenge was for Calcey to understand FFF’s internal process and business domain. A particularly complex process was the workflow for creating meals on a daily basis for each and every subscriber, that meets their nutritional needs while keeping the range of food types to be cooked that day down to a reasonable level. The same food type could only be repeated twice every month to keep things fresh, further complicating this process. Until this point, such complicated tasks were done manually via excel sheets, which meant that FFF’s team had to navigate a plethora of complex excel sheets every day. Other than understanding FFF’s processes, both parties also needed to brainstorm how a new digital platform could help FFF on-board, service and retain customers with greater efficiency.
An in-person ‘discovery and design’ workshop was the best way to go and FFF’s founder, Caspar, and Emma, a key team member, traveled to Sri Lanka for a 5-day workshop. During this intense week, they gave Calcey a crash course in FFF’s processes and brainstormed digital features to improve the business, using whiteboards to draw mind-maps and wireframes to visualize their solutions and aid problem-solving.
Solution
At the of this week-long workshop, FFF had all the assets it needed to go into the software development phase; wireframes of screens for the new platform, written requirements detailing the new solution in user story format, an architecture diagram detailing the technical architecture for the project and the confidence that the Calcey team understood their business and the expectations of the new platform clearly.
An extended software development team from Calcey has since been working on the product roadmap created via the requirements elaboration since and the new platform is now nearing launch.
Impact
The short and intense requirements elaboration exercise enabled FFF to quickly and efficiently transfer its domain knowledge in nutrition science and meal preparation to Calcey. Had both parties skipped ahead to software development straight away, progress would have been slow until the development team gained confidence in the nutrition domain, hence leading to wasted time, money and development resources.
