Intro
I always begin these tales with a historical account of my life.
To make it brief:
I was born and raised in El Paso, TX. It’s that tiny little city that sits in the crevice between Texas, New Mexico and Mexico. Driving to Juarez, Mexico wasn’t uncommon, I spent my days in El Paso and my evenings in Juarez.
Growing up in a city like this has its challenges. You can’t escape it. Not to suggest that the entire population of El Paso goes through these challenges but a good chunk of us did. It’s going through school and having teachers tell you that you are not going to go anywhere in life. It’s being surrounded by poverty. Not being able to pay for lunch. Coming home to a dark house because we couldn’t pay our electricity bill. It’s not being able to pay that electricity bill because you have to support three kids, pay rent, pay for gas and you make minimum wage. It’s having people in your life being shot to death because they were somehow involved with the drug business. This is life in El Paso, well, it was my life.
Because this happens in El Paso, a lot of beautiful things also happen. There are pockets of artists all over the city. Creativity seems to be crawling all over the streets. There is an urge to do more, to fix problems, to change the world and to help people see.
I have had more conversations in El Paso about changing the world than any other place I’ve stepped foot on. Unfortunately, most of these ideas end up dead by the time one has finished a conversation. Passion for change is harvested in every El Pasoan’s heart, but it remains still, passive and unheard just like the city itself. I’m positive this is a consequence of waking up to a city that gives you little to no support to help one grow. There is a lot of El Paso pride in the city. Go El Paso! You’re the best! But rarely have I seen the city own up to its greatness and support the individual, the kid with the ideas.
The few of us who did escape, left because we wanted to pursue those dreams. Some left for school. Some left because they wanted to start a business. Some left to become artists. Whatever the reason, we left in search of something greater and in search of a place that would help us grow.
Design in NYC
My early days in New York were brutal but somewhere along the line, I ended up working for an architecture firm, Interior Design Magazine, Warby Parker, Refinery29, Birchbox and now I’m at Plated.
As a designer, you’re told that you will one day change the world. You will help people. You will be that person that people go to. You’re given tools to be able to break problems down and put them back together. Except, it’s not all rose colored lenses and rainbows, right?
Life for a designer in NYC can be brutal and it can be magical because in order to make change happen, it’s not about you, it’s about the entire ecosystem that keeps us alive and that’s the most beautiful part about working at Plated. We have to work together to empower people.
The teams we’re growing and cultivating fundamentally understand that it’s not about the “self” it’s about something much grander. At Plated, we decided to tackle on one of the most deep rooted issues out there.
Entering the Food Business
There is an astronomically huge problem in America: we no longer know how to eat. Because we no longer how to eat, we make bad food choices.
Food is fuel. In order to live, we must consume. In order to live, we must consume food that gives us energy. However, the biggest shift that has happened recently is that food is no longer seen as fuel. In fact, to take that a step further, food is now seen as pleasure and it has become a spectator sport. This shift has allowed society to de-prioritize the very thing that keeps one alive.
Would you rather have a $5 Little Caesar’s pizza and feel full in your belly or would you rather go next door and spend $20 on vegetables to make a salad that will give you more energy? When you’re counting dollars and cents, that $5 pizza can feed your entire family! And this is exactly what’s wrong with bad food business.
On the business side of things, it’s so easy to make shitty food decisions because businesses are selfish and they optimize for higher revenue numbers, not you, not the consumer. When the business is optimizing for margins and to keep food costs down, solutions like adding corn filler, adding sugar and watering down tomato sauce is perfectly ok— and this is what happens, everywhere, all the time. The food industry is like a Twinkie – it’s a crappy, artificial product wrapped up in an over-engineered packaging supported by billions of dollars of bullshit marketing messages. The next time you have your yogurt, turn it around and check the nutrition label and be mad as hell because it’s time that you demand the right to have real healthy food.
Life at Plated
Life at Plated is interesting. There are no office politics because every employee on staff is there to help people eat better, this is a core requirement. We are a data driven culture and have spent the last year testing and iterating and we are now at the point where we can do some real cool stuff to start making a change in people’s lives.
Design at Plated is also interesting. We took on a forward-thinking approach to organization. Design gets a real seat at the big boys table. We do this for one BIG reason: we don’t fuck over our customers. UX and CX are representatives of our user/customer voice. The designers are in the process of creating beautiful experiences that will empower people to make the food choices they’ve always wanted because at the end of the day, eating well should be made easy.
Luckily, Plated was founded by two awesome dudes, they understand that UX spans the entire customer journey. We do things a little bit funny here, we have designers involved at every step of the journey, from the very 1st interaction (acquisition) to the physical experience (packaging) to the hook that gets people building a habit. You might think that this is an obvious thing to do but look back at your own experience and evaluate who actually puts that into practice. Plated does.
What is Plated and why is it important?
We’ve done a ton of research to understand behavior and cultural shifts. We understand that the idea of dinner has had an epic change in the last 100 years. We understand that our culture is changing, food education hasn’t been in the spotlight, the food supply chain has shifted focus, there’s no pressure to teach people how to cook, no solution to ease them into the process.
We understand that you’re over-working and didn’t get out of work till 8–9–10pm. You’re busy and we get it. However, we firmly believe that being busy is not a barrier to eating well. We’ve created a product that solves all the annoying nuinces of cooking. Plated is a meal-kit delivery service. We partner up with farms to supply you with the freshest ingredients. We have three wonderful chefs who design meals that are perfect (not too complex for beginners and not too boring for the home-cooks). We have a wonderful operations team that’s using data to create better algorithms to get to know you better (that way you’re not spending too much time deciding on what awesome meal to have next).
We do this by removing all the pain points you have with cooking and we leave you with the fun part.
Planning
We understand that many of us weren’t lucky enough to have grown up with food education - we get that planning a meal requires some abstract search online that probably begins with Google. We understand that it can take hours to figure out what to eat. This is why we have chefs and are building Plated 2.0 to help you experience the art of cooking fresh, healthy meals.
Grocery Shopping
We also understand that once you’ve overcome the planning hill- you have to grocery shop. If you’re in a metro, you’re forced to carry bags home in a crowded subway train. If you’re in suburbs- the Whole Foods’ of the world are a 30min drive and you have to compete for that parking spot. We also understand that it’s wasteful to buy a full head of lettuce when you only need a handful. We know it’s annoying to purchase saffron — you only need a sprinkle but you’ll end up spending $15+. We know you’re forced to purchase servings of 2–4 when all you wanted was a single serving. Plated pre-proportions all your recipes. We deliver exactly what you need. There is no waste.
Discovery and Access
Some of us love to go through streams and streams of pinterest recipes. With our chefs on staff, they’re constantly testing out different recipes and curating the best flavors so that you spend more time on the experience of cooking rather than the research. We curate awesome seasonal ingredients so that we use our resources responsibly.
Food with Thought
Be a part of the movement
If something about this post piqued your interest, we are hiring people who fundamentally care about helping people eat better. We’re building a family and we need like-minded people to make this all happen.
If you want to try us out, we deliver to 90% of the country.
Visit Plated at www.plated.com and give us a try. We won’t disappoint.
DESIGN OPEN POSITIONS:
Senior Product Designer
