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At the E-Commerce Expo in September, Tom Wallis, CMO of Gousto, hosted a session discussing how data has helped Gousto improve to unicorn status in 2020, and how the brand is growing and growing maintain their attractiveness after the pandemic.

Image: AmbrosiniV / Shutterstock.com

Like many well-known brands in the grocery delivery and grocery sectors, Gousto was one such company that saw a rapid surge in demand from both new and existing customers when Covid-19 first appeared.

This increase has “created both commitments and opportunities” for Gousto, explains CMO Tom Wallis.

“We felt a huge commitment in those early days to continue to provide food to customers and continue to serve everyone as everyone was looking for food … After those first 12 weeks of stabilization and scaling that we were experiencing, we found that this is also a time for opportunity. How could we use our skills, data and products to make a difference for people and the planet? “

“A data company that loves food”

While the brand welcomed such great interest at a time when others were drying up their own overnight, the high demand for such a complex product fulfillment system presented new challenges that only data could mitigate.

“With 60 recipes, that’s half a million different combinations of four recipes that every customer can choose. Each recipe has around 14 ingredients, we have around 200-300 different ingredients in the factory … and in the end we want to choose just the right ones … weekly. “

Add to this the added pressure of getting prescription boxes to be shipped within 24 hours to ensure quality and freshness, and the process becomes even more complicated. Having an extensive database available enables algorithms to identify potential for improvement and ensure that day-to-day operations in warehouse and factory environments run smoothly.

More recently, Gousto has tackled the problem of rising food prices. Implementing predictive analytics to increase efficiency in the supply chain prevented much of the additional costs from being passed on to the consumer.

These two examples alone make it clear why Wallis describes Gousto as “a data company that loves food”.

Invest in data talent

Aside from compliance challenges, data informs almost every aspect of Gousto’s internal processes, from communicating effectively with audiences to making decisions about the company’s future.

This is partly because Gousto is a relatively young company, which means it was able to gather information on aspects such as recipe popularity, user behavior, and conversion triggers from the get-go.

As the recipe subscription company has grown over the past 9 years, significant investments have been made in talent acquisition – especially in the areas of measurement technology and analytics.

“By far the largest part of the business is engineering and data science. By the end of next year we will have 500 employees in this part of the company, compared to 4 when I started a few years ago. ”Wallis recalls.

But the distribution of that information isn’t limited to these teams, he says. In fact, any non-customer sensitive data is democratized brand-wide, making insights easier to read, understand, and apply to various business functions.

When asked later whether it was difficult to ‘sell’ the idea of ​​democratized data to employees, Wallis said: “Because it was part of culture from day one, the types of people we attracted and hired were more like that Kind of people that appreciated that kind of approach. “

Recommendations and sustainability

Perhaps the biggest contributor to the rapid growth that Gousto has seen in recent years is its focus on understanding its customers and predicting their behavior. This has become even more critical over the past 18 months as habits changed and new external factors came into play.

Wallis believes that Gousto’s offering, complemented by the data collected during this period, will of course remain attractive to consumers after the pandemic. The most prominent USP, of course, is convenience.

“It’s more important than ever to be able to shop quickly and easily, and for us, using data enables us to make that much easier for customers.”

With so many recipes on offer, it can be easy for a Gousto customer to be overwhelmed by too many choices. With informed recommendations based only on the customer’s first orders, the system can pinpoint exactly which properties they like best, be it a preference for specific regional cuisines or a specific type of protein. Such an acceleration of the decision-making process enables a more seamless and safer conversion, according to Wallis: “Over 50% of the recipes are selected from those recommended by the machine learning logic.”

With Covid-19, there has also been an increased focus on the health benefits of consuming fresh foods and the effects of wasting them.

“In a supermarket, up to 20% of the food in the supply chain is wasted … Since we can pretty much predict what people are going to buy, and doing so pretty close to ordering, limit that. This is less than 1% of the food in the supply chain wasted, as real-time data informs exactly how customers choose their recipes. “

Not to mention the environmental benefits of the final product itself. Once the subscription boxes are delivered, the carefully measured ingredients allow customers to avoid additional food waste while cooking.

“Health is another big trend,” Wallis continues. “We see a shift from reactive health … to preventive health attitudes among consumers in the next ten years. So that means that people want to adjust their diets more carefully …

“We believe suggestions like Gousto can use data to help with this… We’ll be able to balance the menu to create an appropriate mix of calorie control, salt, vegetables, etc that is really powerful and really interesting . “

Measure success

Wallis says Gousto has had no problem attracting new customers since the pandemic began, as the factories are “99% busy”. However, just as important for the brand is to retain them long term when the demand for online groceries subsides.

“The main way to do this is to create a better product that suits their needs and personalize it on an individual basis … It builds in the sense that they feel like we know them,” explains he.

“…Use [data] Understanding where something is going wrong has been very important to us in the last 6 months – at least as long as we are working at full capacity – because if customers receive poor service, they will not stay. “

For example, product freshness, missing ingredients or a lack of variety are some of the criticisms that could appear in negative reviews from Gousto subscribers.

“Each of them [categories] gives us an assessment of how important it is to customers. “

The information gathered from these ratings and surveys is then fed into Gousto’s data pool, and the analysis shows that there is a direct correlation between the recommendation rates and the state of the NPS score. Currently, over 40% of Gousto’s new subscribers convert because they were recommended by an existing subscriber, which underscores how a great experience drives word of mouth for the brand.

“Improving the NPS to the highest possible level is the most important metric with which we track general customer satisfaction and general business performance in addition to financial measures. And we’ve found that focusing on the right things that will have the greatest impact creates a sense of focus and behavior in different teams. “

Ultimately, he concluded, data enables teams across the organization to be inspired, learn more about what drives customers, and come up with innovative new ideas and solutions that will help Gousto reach even higher heights in the future.

“The building of this culture is really the seed of it.”