Context
Home Chef is a Chicago-based meal kit company that serves customers across the United States. It helps its customers put a home-cooked meal on the table several days a week, but there is still plenty of shopping customers have to do to fill out the rest of the week.
In late 2020, Kroger, Home Chef's parent company, asked us to figure out how to sell groceries alongside our meal kits.
The project had two goals:
- First, help Kroger expand their delivery service through Home Chef's customer base.
- Second, determine if there were opportunities for Home Chef to introduce grocery items alongside our meal kits.
Framing the Offering
To start, we took a broad view of the opportunity to understand how our customers plan and shop for groceries alongside their meal kit orders.
We found that Home Chef had built a lot of trust with our participants by consistently delivering fresh ingredients. Participants didn't feel the same about their grocery delivery experiences, where substitutions and lackluster produce often left them frustrated with their orders.
In light of this, we positioned the project to focus on offering a smaller selection of shelf-stable items that customers could order on an ad-hoc basis to replenish their pantry.
That way, we could select products with long shelf lives that Kroger consistently had in stock and keep Home Chef's brand promise of quality curation and freshness. It also radically simplified operations for our Kroger counterparts during the pilot.
Coordinating the Team
Working with a large group of Kroger and Home Chef stakeholders, it quickly became apparent that we needed a short-hand way to communicate the end-to-end Pantry experience.
I created a service blueprint to chart the user journey alongside how the organizations and technology would interact. The blueprint made it easy to see where handoffs occurred and how business decisions would affect the user experience.
Design
The interface leveraged Home Chef's design system where appropriate and extended it to account for issues unique to a traditional e-commerce experience.
For the pilot, Pantry functioned as a separate store inside Home Chef's site. The Pantry experience had independent checkout, transaction, and delivery models that are more in line with traditional e-commerce than meal kit subscriptions. To avoid customer confusion, we needed to visually differentiate the Pantry experience from the core meal kit experience.
We accomplished this by separating Pantry from the core Home Chef ordering flow, giving it a place in the top-level navigation with a sub-nav. I leaned heavily on Home Chef's existing design system and created new Pantry-specific components when necessary.
Outcomes
Pantry launched with a pilot in 2021 that indicated a strong product market fit. Unfortunately, Kroger's tactics shifted a few months later, and Pantry was retired.
But we were successful in our second goal. Home Chef's started offering complimentary grocery products alongside meal kits later that year.