Foodee

This was a case of being inspired by a problem. A darkly funny social movement called "Sad Desk Lunch" called to light the destitution of hungry office workers, assembling a meal from saltine crackers, American cheese and ketchup packets from their desk drawer.

Millions of busy professionals spend 8+ hours, 5 days a week working in a basic office space with minimal access to nutritious food options - the options we need to perform at our best.

As one of the founding members of Foodee, I saw an opportunity to disrupt the way how people eat at lunch at work. Since we started with a small team of eight, I had a lot of work and a broad range of responsibility. So I got to work on all design opportunities, from brand awareness to storytelling to end user experience.

First we identified key differentiators and areas we could win against traditional food delivery and corporate catering services. By curating restaurants and offering white glove service we were able to identify a character - not unlike a fox - that seemed to be one step ahead of you.

THE BRAND MARK

Foodee had launched as a food delivery startup with a fox as part of their core identity. The fox upheld values of speed, cunningness and charisma which ported perfectly well into Foodee's focus on corporate catering. Rather than reinvent the mark, I refined it to be more useful and more appropriate for a corprate environment. For example, I simplified it to allow it to be used as a stamp for compostable food containers.

COLOR + TEXTURE

Foodee presented itself as a harbinger of communical eating culture - an antidote to the sterile, anti-social and environment typical of offices. I used restaurant-inspired textures like kraft paper and linen to connect to a rich, elevated social experience.

SKIP THE LINE CAMPAIGN

I produced a short launch campaign using Foxee, Foodee's mascot, to highlight key value propositions.

Skip the Line answers two common office manager anxieties — time is saved, and the best food available is secured.

THE FINAL MILE

We quickly realized that aside from digital properties, there wasn't a lot of face-to-face interaction with the Foodee brand. The ability to embody the brand in those instances was not lost on us — so we spent about 50% of our design efforts branding the final 1% of the delivery cycle when the food was dropped off. We felt that valuable customers are made or broken in this moment.

We identified a few key areas of improvement. Firstly was the delivery infrastructure. Office managers know more than most the impact that delivered food has on the environment and they told us that this factored into their service selection. So we worked with sustainable delivery parnters like an electric trike company and a hybrid-car leasing company to reduce our emissions and be the first choice for sustainably-minded offices.

Secondly, we identified an opportunity to improve the styrofoam packaging that some of our restsaurant partners relied on. We worked closely with these partners to upgrade to more biodegradable options like sugarcane and kraft paper. This was a win-win for Foodee's sustainability story and tactile experience.

Finally, we worked closely with drivers, coaching them on waiter-level ettiquette and finishing off their look with a bowtie - a highly mnemonic choice that no other delivery service opted into.

A focus on sustainability helped office managers sell Foodee as a service to company owners.

Order deck — Logistics map view

Mobile ordering concept — Foodee Fridge

BEHIND THE SCENES

Besides the moment of delivery, or the 10 minutes or so spent on the website or phone making orders, customers don't spend a lot of time interacting with the brand. And this is somewhat by design — by making the ordering process a set-and-forget task, we rate higher with time-strapped office managers. To make the system work in this almost magical way, a few key technical elements were used to fulfill the promise.

THE ORDER DECK

We built an internal order deck tool, focusing on the needs of account managers and logistics. Account managers could gain customer visibility on dietary preferences and typical order sizes by pre-loading quick-view information upon an incoming customer communication.

For each of Foodee's 10 markets, a logistics manager oversees daily deliveries. By highlighting priorities like late deliveries or missed items, the map view gives them air-traffic-controller level of the days' deliveries, real-time.

IMPACT

10x

increase in geographic locations

$11m

generated in seed funding

7

products launched