Farmer's Fridge
Enhancing the Experience for a Scaling Start-Up
The Challenge
Growing fast in the Midwest and on the verge of expanding into new markets, food-tech start-up Farmer’s Fridge had to shore up its brand story and strategy for delivering a tasty, top-notch customer experience.
The Outcome
After updating the Brand Bible—complete with mission, vision, core values and attributes, we developed a cohesive suite of tools to optimize the consumer journey, including a customer experience roadmap, service blueprint and content strategy playbook.
RIGOROUS RESEARCH
We began by visiting nine Chicago locations during peak hours to observe people interacting with the futuristic smart Fridges, then toured FF’s Chicago kitchen to see firsthand the care and craft behind each wholesome meal.
Through regular collaborative worksessions, we learned about the organizational and production processes that shape the offering, allowing us to meaningfully integrate their team’s ideas and operational considerations into our recommendations for improving the end-to-end Farmer’s Fridge experience. By including many client stakeholders, we not only heard diverse perspectives, we were able to continuously build buy-in for suggested changes. Not always an easy feat.
Diverse Contexts
Farmer’s Fridge shows up everywhere from hospital waiting rooms to Walgreens. We had to consider diverse audience needs and levels of brand familiarity—not to mention environmental factors beyond our control—when rethinking the Fridge experience.
Innovative vs Intuitive
Farmer’s Fridge offers a new model for buying lunch on the go. But it’s not enough to be innovative. We had to make the model more intuitive to help newcomers purchase with confidence.
Sustainable Strategy
Keeping up with rapid change is common among scaling start-ups. While the Farmer’s Fridge team was aligned on vision, brand messaging had grown unwieldy. The Brand Bible had become a burden to maintain, rather than an evergreen guide to brand consistency. We needled and nudged and led thoughtful discussion to figure out how to best define the brand.
FROM INSIGHT TO ACTION
After a winter of intensive research and discovery, it was time to turn all that we’d learned into actionable tools and strategies. We created a few key user scenarios, taking into account known customer concerns, pain points, needs and expectations to outline the ideal experience.
“Working with Firebelly helped guide our team towards finalizing our brand voice, tone and mission – they were wonderful collaboration partners and helped us establish a platform we can build on as we refine our brand.”
— Luke Saunders, Founder & CEO of Farmer's Fridge
A COHESIVE COLLECTION OF TOOLS
Firebelly created an updated brand bible, mapped the customer journey experience and established the content strategy playbook. All three tools were designed and written to complement one another.
Updated Brand Bible
We streamlined to the essentials, stripping out anything that could easily change with market demands or operational growth and ensuring that each and every piece of the brand framework would hold true across all touchpoints and audiences.
Customer Experience
We mapped each distinct phase of the customer journey, noting all relevant channels, actors and opportunities to turn brand newbies into loyalists and loyalists into ambassadors, as well as recommendations for brand expression.
Content Strategy Playbook
With clear objectives and customer needs identified for every possible brand touchpoint, we developed content recommendations and best practices for a variety of channels, from the Fridge Vend Screen and wayfinding signage to email.
The Brand Bible is the go-to resource for understanding the what, how and why behind Farmer’s Fridge.
The Customer Experience Roadmap shows the high level view of each stage of the customer journey, from Planting a Seed to Coming Back for More.
For a deeper dive, the service blueprint shows all relevant brand touchpoints and communication channels associated with each phase of the journey.