Foodbag
THE CHALLENGE
After years of being each other's biggest competitors, Stéphane Ronse of Foodbag and Anders Asarby of Smartmat decided to bury the kitchen knives in 2019 and join forces. A smart move, they soon realised. At the same time, they also faced a huge challenge: to deliver an even better performance together in the new, challenging meal box market, they had to automate their systems and make them smarter. And as if that wasn't enough, they hit another bump in the road, soon after with the pandemic. Suddenly, they went from 20,000 to 70,000 meals a week and a 30% market share.
The kind of challenge that Sparklink was only too happy to sink its teeth into. The result? One single smart, integrated and customisable solution, with Salesforce as the binding agent.
Who is Foodbag?
- The result of the merger of Smartmat (the first meal kit on the Belgian market) and Foodbag. Recently, they also acquired their competitor 15gram
- The leading HelloFresh challenger in the Belgian market, with a market share of approx. 30%
- Sells more than 100,000 plates a week, accounting for 7 million meals a year
- With the support of Korys, the Colruyt family's investment fund. In 2022, the Colruyt Group also came on board
- A turnover of over 20 million euros with 50+ employees
- A Sparklink client since 2016
SOLUTION
A la carte meal kits thanks to a smart menu planning app
There is no accounting for taste, and especially not when it comes to food. We are all different, and we all have foods we like, hate or simply can’t eat due to allergies, meaning flexibility is paramount for a meal kit like Foodbag. Whereas they originally started out with a meal kit and a fixed set of dishes, Foodbag nowadays lets you choose from 35 dishes and five cuisines each week. You choose whether you want to order food for three, four, five or six days, and for each dish you can also specify how many people will be tucking into it. Fancy an extra, like breakfast or an aperitif box? It's all possible. With or without a subscription.
Piecing together this complicated puzzle week after week is a real feat. A lot of analysis and thinking went into the implementation of the central menu planning application. With Sparklink coming on board as Foodbag’s IT partner.
Smart menu planning helps Foodbag's chefs create more than 30 different dishes every week. The application calculates the food cost for 1 to 5 people in real time, and suggests the right quantities (a 125-g container of sour cream for 1 to 2 people, a larger 250-g container for all other combos). Thanks to smart integration with the main ingredient supplier, price information is updated weekly and adjustments can be made.
Sustainable collaboration and zero waste
While Foodbag's dishes are created and planned in-house, stock management is outsourced to their main supplier. Thanks to far-reaching integration between Salesforce and this supplier's procurement management, the result is a seamless collaboration and zero waste.
A forecasting tool calculates how many dishes and which ingredients will be needed in the next few days. And because all the exact quantities are ordered on time, no fresh food is lost. This is in sharp contrast to traditional supermarkets where 20-25% of fresh food sometimes goes to waste. Our knowledge of the logistics industry was also quite useful in this instance. After ordering, Foodbag is automatically sent the effective daily prices by Vawi, its fruit and vegetable supplier, and prices and seasonal items are reviewed weekly.
THE SOLUTION
One headless CMS takes care of the mise-en-place for the website, socials, and the meal kits
You’d be surprised at what it takes to put together and distribute meal kits without a hitch. Fortunately, all the information needed to prepare delicious Foodbag meals at home is centralised in one simple solution.
The Digital Asset Manager, developed by Sparklink on the Salesforce platform, crops, resizes and optimises all food photos into the desired formats for use on the website, socials and in e-mails. Even the recipe sheets in each meal kit, which therefore look different for each customer, are automatically personalised and digitally printed based on the data and photos in Salesforce
Besides being the central management system for the operational part of Foodbag, Salesforce thus also is the headless Content Management System (CMS) for all dishes listed on the website.
The icing on the cake
Sparklink's solution also includes numerous e-commerce features that Foodbag can set up all by itself, such as discount codes, a loyalty programme, tell a friend and so on.
Every week, all the address details and possible delivery times for home deliveries, which are managed by Foodbag, are forwarded to the external route planner. Foodbag is also the first supplier whose orders you can pick up yourself from your local Colruyt 'Collect & Go' collection point when you do your other shopping.
Besides flexible ordering, Foodbag also allows customers to pay with various payment methods. We have integrated the Payement service, so you can also pay with meal vouchers. No subscription required, by the way.
And finally, reporting and dashboards are also in Salesforce. Sales figures, food cost, trends, ratings... You can visualise this in just a few clicks thanks to the software.
In short: one single integrated, smart and adaptable solution to create, plan, order, communicate, sell, pay for and deliver meal kits.
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