Reimagining Meal-kit Upselling

Marley Spoon sends weekly meal kits, customer select recipes, and the company delivers fresh, seasonal ingredients to cook at home. Marley Spoon had around 300,000 active subscribers worldwide. In addition to the meal-kit subscription, Marley Spoon offers Market, a marketplace featuring ingredients and pantry goods. I have contributed to enhancing the upselling strategy for Market products, increasing attachment rates by ~2.5% and boost the average order value by 0.5% to net revenue.

Problem

Marley Spoon & Dinnerly launched their marketplace in 2022. The global attachment rate of the marketplace has plateaued at 8% since its launch

The marketplace includes grocery shopping, takeout, and ready-to-heat meals. Currently, the marketplace lacks adequate promotion. While we can showcase highlighted market products through email marketing, customers cannot directly access these products from the email. Instead, they must navigate the marketplace themselves while selecting their weekly recipes. Additionally, we have limited promotional space on the mobile app and website to feature the highlighted products communicated via email marketing.

Design Approach

Research

UI/UX Design

Usability Testing

Collecting Data

Enabling users to modify proteins or sides using a customizable feature has effectively boosted the average order value.

Customizable recipes were initially introduced in early 2023. This feature allows customers to modify or upgrade the protein or side in each recipe. Additionally, it enables vegetarian users to remove animal protein or substitute it with plant-based protein. The customizable recipes have proven to be highly successful, resulting in an uplift in conversion rates of around 4%.

Utilizing a customizable feature allowing customers to include appetizers or desserts with their recipe created an additional 2.5%-5% of the marketplace attachmeant rate.

Using the same feature, the culinary team experimented with allowing customers to add marketplace products instead of changing proteins, such as an appetizer like garlic bread, to their orders. Incorporating these items with the recipe resulted in up to an additional revenue increase in the featured product. However, due to the limitation of allowing customers to change only one aspect of the recipe at a time, we observed a trade-off: while marketplace revenue increased, there was a decline in the number of customers changing proteins or sides.

Landscape Analysis

Many meal-kit subscriptions have introduced a food pairing concept into their offerings by incorporating market products and bundling them as part of a full-course meal experience.

It has become a common trend in the meal-kit industry that after establishing their subscription services, many companies, such as HelloFresh, Blue Apron, and Sunbasket, have expanded their offerings to include grocery shopping experiences. To drive growth in these product categories, they also implement various cross-selling and upselling strategies within their subscription plans.

Identifying Opportunities

Together with the merchandising team, we have decided to introduce a pairing feature to customers in addition to customizing the recipe.

With the pairing feature, customers can not only tailor their recipe according to their needs, but also personalize their meal by including a market product such as appetizer, dessert, or drink to elevate their experience. Besides the new pairing feature, we also prioritize a new promotional strategy improving the market products' visibility throughout the user journey.

Conceptualization

Building upon the existing UX pattern of recipe customization, I've explored a concept of meal personalization, empowering users to craft their own meal.

Based on the conversion uplift observed from customizable recipe testing, I have decided to retain the same user flow while enhancing the layout of customizable recipes. Meal personalization now includes more information about the recipes and recommendations for pairing market products with recipes.

High-fidelity Design

Including images of raw ingredients for customizable recipes could be disturbing for many users.

I believe that displaying customizable ingredients could help users understand what they would receive in their recipe when they customize it. However, many ingredients for customizable recipes include raw meat. There was a hypothesis that images of raw meat could be unappealing to vegan and vegetarian users, potentially lowering the conversion rate. To ensure the solution uses the right visuals, I decided to conduct a quick usability test.

Unmoderated Usability Test

I conducted a comparative usability test with 42 customers, half of whom are vegetarian or vegan.

Comparative usability testing is a method in which multiple versions of a functional product are shown to users, and their feedback is measured against one another for each task. I designed a test comprising two versions of the customizing experience. In the test, users were asked to complete several tasks, such as customizing their recipe, adding a pairing item, and answering follow-up questions.

The test utilized a prototype based on the mobile app. Participants were divided into two groups. The first group viewed the feature with the raw meat image first, followed by the feature with icons. Conversely, the second group saw the icons first, followed by the raw meat image.

Test Result

Out of the 42 participants, only 8 mentioned that they did not want to see raw meat images.

From those 8 people, 6 of them are either vegetarian or vegan. Due to the limitations of the unmoderated test, no in-depth reasons were provided on why raw meat ingredients weren't disturbing for them. However, several feedbacks mentioned that the ingredient images helped them visualize the choices they would get. Overall, the participants understood how to customize the recipe along with adding a market product.

Iteration

Removing recipe image helps users to focus on ingredient customization and market product.

During testing, I observed that over half of the users were primarily drawn to the recipe image, title, and subtitle, despite these elements not being the primary focus of the feature. I decided to iterate on the UI, maintaining a similar structure while removing the recipe image and retaining only the recipe title. This adjustment ensures that users can still identify the recipe they're selecting while minimizing distractions from the main goal of the feature.

Performance

Over the past 3 months, there was an increase in market attachment rate by ~2.5%.

Even though the target uplift was about 4%, the ~2.5% in each region was considered to be a success for the new meal upselling strategy. It's also a good start for the future iterations and next steps.

+2.8%

In Market attachment rate in the US within the first 3 months resulted in over $54k in net revenue

+2.5%

In Market attachment rate in Australia within the first 3 months resulted in over $45k in net revenue

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