Giant Eagle is a well-established grocery store chain based in Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia, Indiana, and Maryland. As our client, the grocery store chain seeks to enhance the visibility and appeal of its prepared meals section to capture a larger customer base.
Increasing Customer Retention
Our testing revealed an average NPS score of 58, indicating a strong potential for enhanced customer loyalty and retention.
Maximizing Profit Potential
Assuming Giant Eagle's business remains sustainable, we identified optimal delivery hours (5pm - 9:30pm), projecting $65.98 million in annual income for HotBites. With a startup cost of $306K, this strategy could yield an annual profit of $65.67 million.
Addressing Food Deserts
Our proposition ensures that Giant Eagle’s food reaches underserved areas, expanding the company’s market presence while supporting and nourishing these communities. This solution has the potential to increase service reach by approximately 12%.
Brand Advertisement
Our delivery trucks double as mobile billboards, providing high-visibility advertising for Giant Eagle during peak city traffic, effectively reaching a broad audience.
Customers’ weekly ‘big shop’ typically occurs on Fridays and Saturdays, but by Wednesday and Thursday, they often run out of groceries and turn to alternatives like restaurants, food delivery services, or frozen meals.
Recognizing this pattern, Giant Eagle aims to capture these customers by enticing them with their diverse prepared foods section through a new service offering. By doing so, Giant Eagle will provide a convenient and enticing solution that meets customers’ mid-week meal needs enhancing overall customer satisfaction and loyalty.
We began by analyzing customer sentiment from social media comments about Giant Eagle and researching reports from the store and its competitors in the prepared food business but realized this wasn't enough as it didn’t reveal why customers were turning to different options. To understand what influences customers' decisions to buy or not to buy prepared foods, we needed more in-depth insights
Hence, we first performed a field study observing customers in their natural shopping environment and then carried out contextual inquiries through intercept interviews with customers, delegate shoppers (such as those from Instacart), store workers, and chefs in the kitchens of four major stores across Pittsburgh.
While pre-packed foods were not as popular among customers, the hot food counters were contrastingly popular with those walking into the store.
About 90% of the sales at these hot food counters come from walk-ins, while the remaining 10% are through online or phone orders.
Due to space limitations, only a few store locations sell hot foods, causing food desert areas around the city.
Poor packaging coupled with longer delivery and pickup times creates a perception among customers that the food is unappetizing.
Our research insights highlighted that Giant Eagle needed to enhance its value proposition for prepared food products to better appeal to customers.
There were two approaches to enhancing Giant Eagle’s value proposition: one was to create a completely new service to replace the existing prepared food offerings, and the other was to improve the current service to make the prepared food offerings more appealing to customers. But to proceed, we needed to understand what values were being exchanged between the business and its customers at the current stage.
Hence, we plotted the value exchange model of the business and examined where we could address the problems that we had identified.
After, figuring out what values we wanted to prioritize we wanted to understand where we could fit components that would help create these values for the business as well as for the customers. Service Blueprinting helped us to quickly visualize the relationships between different components such as people, physical/digital props, and processes that are directly tied to the touchpoints in the customer journey in buying prepared foods.
These activities helped us identify gaps and uncover opportunities. We examined not only Giant Eagle’s service proposition but also those of competitors like DoorDash and Uber Eats. We asked ourselves…
In the current food delivery model, delays occur as drivers must travel to the restaurant, pick up the order, and then deliver it, often resulting in cold food. However, our research indicated that Hot Food counters are psychologically associated with fresh food and hence tend to sell faster.
Hence, our ideation and brainstorming focused on finding ways to speed up delivery and keep food hot to improve the customer experience.
To address the problem, we decided to enhance the appeal of prepared foods by replicating the hot food experience and bringing it to customers' homes. Our service proposition addresses this by using a climate-controlled unit to keep food hot and eliminating restaurant stops to speed up delivery.
We had this concept but we needed to validate it with potential customers. We quickly prototyped some screens that would help us test out our service concept.
Our team tested our service concept by using a Wizard of Oz approach to simulate delivery times and service with our prototypes. We included a diverse customer base in the testing, comprising single students and adults with families.
We gathered insights from our testing and refined our value proposition. More importantly, we realized the need to make concrete assumptions for the service's growth in line with our vision.
Our solution included: a mobile app prototype, a conceptual design of the delivery van, an explainer video to demonstrate the service offering, and an infomercial poster to raise awareness about the service.
This project was my first attempt at in designing a service around a very established brand and it was a very different experience from designing products and interfaces. Here are my top 4 learnings from this project:
