Superday Series: Choice Tribe
Menu and Food, Supply and Network
The second in our Superday series is the Choice tribe, which is responsible for bringing a wide selection of high quality recipes to customers every week. The tribe is split into two focus areas: food strategy and supply strategy. The Kimchis and Radishes Tech squads handle the Recipe and Menu side, while the Pumpkins and Pickles own Forecasting, Network Optimisation and other parts of the Supply and Network domain. These squads also work closely with the Recipe Development, Supply Chain and Material Planning teams.
Gousto’s strategy is currently focused on offering customers more choice, so this tribe had a lot to say in their presentation. They also made it tennis themed and we enjoyed the many puns, references and GIFs.
Kimchis
The Kimchis are responsible for Recipe Management and Menu Optimisation, working to generate weekly menus optimised for customer satisfaction, business objectives, and operating constraints. In their Superday presentation, the Kimchis described the new Recipe edit-history feature which shows all changes to a recipe, reducing the number of food process checks by 25% in the first month alone. There is also a new photography management page which provides a ‘View the Recipe’ status for upcoming menu weeks, so the team can get ahead of issues and fill in any photo gaps. Each Gousto recipe comes with a recipe card featuring a high-quality image of the dish; without the photo, a recipe cannot be added to the menu. This new feature has saved multiple teams time, improving efficiency and reducing customer risk. Ace!
Radishes
Next up were the Radishes, a squad whose mission is to show customers items they cannot resist and enable them to build their perfectly unique box. In the user journey, the Radishes cover the steps where you view the menu and choose your recipes, add extras, confirm your order, add marketplace items, and potentially edit and reconfirm your order.
Largely, the Radishes are responsible for customisation. They took us through a successful experiment they ran in Q2 to make customers aware of better value for money when they order more recipes. They wanted to prime customers by making them aware of this early on in the journey, and succeeded in increasing the average number of recipes in each order by adding a price per portion message to the menu page. They also talked about webstock, which refers to the Recipe stock management for our website. By upgrading the tool, the team is now able to set caps on recipes to control uptake. To implement this, they worked with all the squads in the Choice tribe, demonstrating how collaborative the teams are.
The Designer in Radishes explained some design concepts for a new initiative which will be released later in the year. They explained their process, beginning with identifying all possible touch points and then surveying customers about their User Experience. This work was done in collaboration with the Turnips squad’s new recipe design, which you can read about here. The Radishes also worked with the Copywriting team to ensure the messaging suits a variety of customer situations.
We look forward to hearing more about these experiments later this year and sharing more information once the results are in.
Recipe Library
We then heard from the Recipe Library team, who are responsible for (you guessed it!) the Menu. The team knew there was an opportunity to improve Gousto’s offering for families, so they conducted some research to understand how to ensure customer needs are being met. From this research, they identified four common themes in families’ choices of meals: familiarity, adaptability, convenience and health. After learning that a significant proportion of families adapt Gousto meals to make them both tasty for adults and suitable for kids, the Recipe team developed a concept for an ‘always-on’ range consisting of 20 new recipes, which they took into further testing with Gousto parents and family customers. The Recipe Development team then created a range of recipes called Family Kitchen which can be easily customised for adults, but which are still convenient and healthy.
The images below show some examples of the recipes found in the Family Kitchen range. We think they look pretty great!
Ingredient Sourcing
At Gousto, we are always seeking to improve products to further satisfy our customers. In Q3, the Recipe team have introduced Little Dish kids meals to the marketplace, found a new source of high-quality free-range chicken, and identified a new brioche product which will be used in all relevant recipes, reducing operational complexity.
The Ingredient Sourcing team also updated us on recent produce innovation, such as improving the recyclability of products. As you can see in Gousto’s 2022 Impact Report, 72% of our packaging is now recyclable, with the aim of hitting 100% recyclable and reusable own-brand packaging by 2025.
This is what we love about Superday: it’s amazing to hear these statistics and be reminded of Gousto’s vision to have a positive impact on people and the planet.
Supply and Network
In the second part of the Choice tribe’s presentation, we heard from the Supply and Network team. They told us how they dealt with issues related to frozen food storage costs, out of data waste and supplier challenges to deliver positive outcomes in Q3 such as new buyer collaborations and better stock management systems.
The Pumpkins squad have been working to support the Supply team by building a new Material Planning Requirements tool (MRP) which weighs up the balance between product availability and waste, ensuring there is enough food for each menu week while limiting the amount of food left unused.
At Gousto, there are dozens of unique ingredients for boxes, each with different information, and there is a different mix of these products every week. The recipes on the menu affect the demand, so the MRP helps the Supply team manage ingredients, ensuring that there is the right stock available in the right place and at the right time. How does this work? The team determines how much stock is required to maintain a consistent level, and develops automatic ordering. They then test OTIF (recipes delivered On Time in Full) against the waste levels, so they can tweak the parameters and manage this fine balance between availability and waste. This kind of collaborative project is essential at Gousto, and it’s great to see the MRP tool having such a positive impact after so much hard work.
Pickles
The Pickles squad is responsible for Forecasting and Network Optimisation. They have recently been trialling a new optimiser, which decides which box should be prepared at which factory. Comparing the current model with the new model, it is clear that the latter has dramatically reduced site-specific forecasting errors. As a bonus, it has also reduced both OTIF and food waste in testing, and will therefore be brought into production soon.
The Pickles have also improved their optimisation testing algorithm, which calculates the eligibility of orders (i.e. how many orders can be fulfilled at each site). This was a collaboration between Data Science, Demand and Supply Planning management and Digital Product, and had the positive results of unlocking more value for each SKU and reducing complexity in the supply chain.
The Pickles have also been working on a new order simulator, which takes various inputs (ingredients, recipe popularity forecast, webstock, order volume forecast) and spits out simulated orders. This helps the team to decide which recipes should be hosted by each factory, which factory each box should be routed to, and how orders should be routed and picked inside the factories. The old simulator unlocked site specific forecast, but it under simulated the most popular recipes and over simulated the least popular ones. The new one resolves this issue, while also reducing recipe portion forecast volatility, strictly adheres to recipe caps (as explained above) and forecasts how recipes tend to be paired with each other in customer boxes.
Supply Chain
The team is able to monitor and optimise the Supply Chain by using a stock coverage model which takes the inventory and subtracts the forecasted demand to get the stock coverage position. Previously, there was no visibility of future stock shortages beyond 24 hours. With the new model, there is a network overview of all shortages for the next 4 weeks as well as an inventory of the current stock hold. The goal is to have no stock shorts and also to reduce unnecessary stock holding to limit food waste. Another solution-oriented approach to stock coverage visibility has been to create a reporting function which suggests the expected waste for a factory and uses data to inform actions. Later this year, the Supply team and Pickles plan to develop this further, using historic count and trending data to create trend analysis against categories, suppliers, and processes.
Conclusion
Overall, the Choice Superday presentation provided a fascinating insight into the Food and Menu, Supply and Optimisation domains. By expanding Gousto’s offering to satisfy a wider range of tastes, budgets and occasions, the Choice tribe plays a significant role in the company’s strategy to satisfy even more customer needs. We are very excited for the work that will be carried out in this domain in the next few months.
With thanks to the Choice tribe and everyone who contributed to the Superday presentation
