Last year, diginomica looked at how pet food supplier freshpet overhauled its traditional comms channels to improve engagement with its customers, AKA pet parents. Flash forward six months and work continues with the latest development being a push to create more flexible experiences for pets and parents.
The aim is to enable more personalization in the form of Freshpet’s Custom Food proposition. These allow customers to order the best recipes for their pet’s needs, in the right quantities, to meet the specifications of their meal plans, which can be developed based on several factors, including a pet’s sex, age, weight and activity level.
It’s also about a move to add a direct-to-consumer model to its existing network of retailers servicing 11.5 million US households. While the company’s traditional focus has been on its in-store network, Sobel said he recognized that the right technology platform would help the company explore a new business model:
We saw this as an opportunity. Our transition to piloting a direct-to-consumer (D2C) experience is about being available to pet parents where and how they want to shop. So, when we decided to pilot the move to a direct-to-consumer experience, we looked at building the best tech stack we could versus building a solution on our own.
Building personalization
The company selected Ordergroove’s Bundles Suite offering to deliver this new functionality. Using API tech, retailers can build bundles and subscription-based offers for customers, which fit Freshpet’s brief, according to Jessie Sobel, VP of Strategic Growth Initiatives:
We want to move to subscriptions because we’ve seen when ordering pet food through our pureplay approach that 70% comes through auto-ship. That’s the most sustainable business model for what we offer. The second piece is that many pet parents want variety, so bundles are equally important. We recognize that custom foods, subscription recipes and quantities are different for each pet.
This new D2C business model is currently being tested in a pilot geography where customers can now order pet food bundles with recipes optimized for sensitivity and goals in health of their pets. As requirements change, so can the mix of products that Freshpet delivers to doorsteps:
Ordergroove allows the customer from an order management perspective to change their mix, which is unique to the tech stack – to have the ability to change recipes in the mix without setting up bundles…The quantity of logic that went into the systems allows each pet parent to have a different mix of recipes, quantities and frequency of servings. All that work happens in the background and the flexibility is there to allow us to offer different plans.
With the local test running, the next big challenge is figuring out how or when to scale this new business model, Sobel said:
Freshpet is primarily sold through our 34,000 refrigerators. So, from a business perspective, I think we just have the long-term opportunity in mind. It is not a business that we need to grow very quickly. We are still focused on our core business.
For now, his team will continue to refine the technology stack and the business will consider how it can implement an effective delivery solution for Freshpet Custom Meals in other geographies:
Now we put together an end-to-end solution, it’s about deciding whether or not we want to go to higher population metropolitan areas or if we want to figure out a last mile national solution. So, 12 months from now, we’ll have more geography. Just a question of where and how.
