How digital supply chain developments improved CX for Gousto

About Gousto

Since launching in 2012, Gousto has taken the world of meal kits by storm.

Seeing 170% year-on-year growth, and delivering over 1.5 million meals a month to customers, Gousto needed to ensure both their people and their digital supply chain were set up and supported to maintain these impressive figures.

With ambitious growth plans for the business, including PCI migration and intelligent packaging, Gousto partnered with AND Digital to accelerate getting to done.

Mapping out requirements

Aligning with Gousto's original vision

To kickstart the PCI integration work, we created architecture and swimlane diagrams and matched them to the team’s existing Jira tickets. This quickly aligned the work we needed to do with Gousto’s original vision, and gave quick visibility on progress to the team and wider stakeholders.

Improving the digital supply chain

Creating efficiency and improving UX for Gousto and its users

After defining the requirements, we moved on to the first five build projects, which were focused on a set of key improvements:

PCI migration - To help Gousto become PCI compliant, we quickly rebuilt their payment process using Checkout.com’s payment provider API a number of AWS services: Amazon SNS, Amazon SQS, DynamoDB, AWS CloudFormation, CloudWatch and Lambda.
New Recipe product - Gousto wanted to be able to efficiently create new recipes in their system that could record key details like allergy and dietary needs. To enable this content flow, we built a 'New Recipe' feature for Gousto’s teams in PHP, React.JS. This also used SNS, SQS, S3, DynamoDB, Cloudformation, Cloudwatch and Lambda.
Intelligent packaging - An algorithm that selects the box size for an order needed fine tuning in order to improve its accuracy, in turn ensuring packaging costs for the business were as low as possible. We developed a new algorithm using PHP and Python that split an order into ambient and chilled groups, looked up the ingredient volumes and calculated the total volume required.

Next day delivery - Next day delivery was a key feature Gousto was missing. We created this new functionality with PHP, Python, React.JS and AWS. We added values for 24-, 48- and 72-hour delivery options - as well as the new next day and two-day delivery options.
Migration of 'My Deliveries' - With a frontend split between an old PHP stack and a new React site, we helped Gousto migrate over to the new codebase, beginning with 'My Deliveries'. To deliver this quickly and minimise disruption to customers, we de-scoped the project to focus squarely on the technical aspects first prior to looking at UI enhancements.

Impact

Refreshed roadmap Rapid migration to React meant previously blocked work could restart.

Cloud AWS services allowed Gousto to leverage the flexibility and scalability of cloud.

Savings £150k a year thanks to an improved packaging algorithm.

Savings £180k savings over 3 years

KPIs KPI hit meaning Gousto can offer next day delivery in line with competitors

Key outcomes

Improved architecture, significant savings

Our work with Gousto made a huge impact on operating costs

Key KPI hit - Next Day Delivery ensures Gousto’s offering is squarely in line with competitors.
Refreshed roadmap - the quick migration to React enabled previously blocked work to restart, including changes to design and new features.
New AWS Cloud architecture - implementing new AWS services meant Gousto was able to quickly realise its newly derived Cloud architecture.
Savings of £150k a year - with an improved, intelligent packaging algorithm.
Savings of £180k over three years - by evaluating and switching provider for the PCI migration.
Reduced liability and risk - the PCI migration project now means no sensitive payment information is stored by Gousto.
Agile upskilling - with training, talks and a bespoke hackathon for Gousto’s team run by AND.