Splendid Spoon: delivering healthy food across the US
The challenge
Splendid Spoon got in touch with Vinta to build a custom platform tailored to their needs from the ground up, particularly one that could allow for both recurring and prepaid plans. That is one of our most requested services due to our knowledge on MVPs. To build the new platform, we allocated a dedicated team of consultants to collaborate constantly and transparently with Splendid Spoon team.
The new Splendid Spoon
Splendid Spoon is a souping delivery company from New York, and they offer weekly plant-based vegan & gluten-free subscription programs. They were growing fast, with some glowing appearances on Business Insider and Cool Hunt, and needed new features to make their platform more personal for each user, and that automated some of their delivery processes.
Such features weren't possible with the turnkey marketplace they were using. So they contacted us to develop a custom system, 100% tailored to their needs. This is one of our most requested services due to our expertise on building MVPs and software products. That allows us to not only act as a development team, but to bring business insights to the project as well.
The first big challenge we tackled was the user’s account section, because of the heavy business logic it had to accommodate. When building products like this, we establish steady communication channels with our clients, and work with an open scope. This allows the product team to learn along the journey, change course and iterate based on user feedback.
Evolving the product with the demand
As Splendid Spoon evolved as a business over time, so did the software. Opening a new distribution center to deliver faster for the west coast, integrating multiple carriers, and accommodating data analysis tools were some of the challenges that came with growth. As a proven team of specialists, we're used to that and focus our efforts on giving the client all technical information they might need to make informed product decisions.
Some of these changes had an impact on the platform's business logic, others on integrations with carriers (like FedEx and UPS) APIs, some even demanded whole features to be reshaped. Still, all of them were made in alignment with the company board and aimed at growing their operations and user-base. Our design team conducted usability research for features that involved major changes is the costumer onboarding experience, and iterations on the subscription flow were always informed by metrics.
Technical choices and tools
For the front-end, we used Bootstrap 4, SASS, and React accompanied by a Django back-end using Stripe for money transfers and payments, always updating our stack to the latest and more stable version. We also provided a Google Tag Manager and Analytics consultancy. One feature we are very proud of is the testing system we developed to test some very date-dependent features on the server. We froze the server time and allowed operation managers to control it via Admin. We also organized a testing script that aggregated value to the client (anyone who wants to test the code will find our script already calibrated for the nuances of date-related problems). This script was also incorporated in our process for future testing on the subject.
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