Fresh Fitness Food

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 customised 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. And so began our mission to help transform a simple brick-and-mortar operation into a food-tech company with a tech-enabled competitive moat.

To delight its customers by delivering bespoke meals, FFF needs to gather data on the dietary preferences and nutrition needs of each individual customer. This data must then be 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 must be cooked, packaged, and delivered on time.

With automation being the obvious solution, 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 custom relationship management tools so that FFF could track and nurture customers in different ways based on their position in the customer lifecycle.

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 helped launch a brand new mobile app through which FFF’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 very 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 into the app, we want to help FFF attract a whole new cohort of customers who wish to manage all aspects of their fitness through one single, uncomplicated app.

If you think we are done, we are not. As you read this, we’ve begun building a globally franchisable digital platform that will allow FFF to expand into other regions and countries with ease. We will tell you all about it when it’s ready, but in the meantime… ?

• 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