Eldum Rétt is the market leader in Iceland, offering a subscription service delivering food boxes with cooking instructions for home cooking. The concept is to provide flexible and varied options for customers of all family sizes that can be ordered and managed completely online. Eldum Rétt achieved double digit growth rates year after year over the past 5 years whilst also increasing revenue per meal. Their customer base increased by 30%. The average order size per customer by 50%.
Their business fully depends on the data from the system we built for them in 2018. Since then we have continuously updated and upgraded the solution.
Who is Eldum Rétt?
Eldum Rétt is the market leader for a subscription service that provides food boxes for home cooking to private households in Iceland.
Founded in 2013, they were the first company in Iceland to offer this service and the first ones to provide the highest level of flexibility in terms of subscriptions, food preferences and delivery to their customers.
Through the website or mobile app, customers choose their favourite dishes and get the corresponding amount of ingredients together with the recipes delivered in one box. Thanks to the large selection of recipes, there is something for every occasion, from a simple family meal to an elaborate New Years Eve menu. This service saves customers from the stress of shopping and as they are sent the ingredients for specific meals it also saves on food waste.
Today they distribute about 400.000 meals to Icelandic households every year. The online business employs 35 people. After only 10 years, Eldum Rétt was able to reach a yearly turnover of EUR 10.000.000 in 2022 (or ISK 1 544 000 000).
What problem was the client facing?
The original website was built in 2014 using Drupal 7 with Drupal Commerce. However, as the business grew they needed to upgrade their digital infrastructure to accommodate the new requirements. They run their daily business using data from the system and go above and beyond to satisfy the needs of their customers.
Eldum Rétt was the first company in Iceland to offer this service and they wanted to provide the most technologically innovative service to their customers. Their customer-centric approach offers customised options for subscriptions, food preferences, and delivery.
The requirements for the online services of Eldum Rétt are complex and extensive. Customers can choose food boxes with cooking instructions from a curated selection and are able to individually configure their food boxes in terms of:
- frequency (change, pause or adapt their subscriptions)
- flexible number of portions
- flexible schedules
- different places of delivery
- step-by-step cooking instructions
- individual taste profiles
- set price limits
- gift vouchers
- ancillary products.
How could we help?
When Eldum Rétt reached out to 1xINTERNET, they were looking to upgrade their digital landscape in order to exploit the technical possibilities of using data from the system to optimise internal processes.
They adopted a customer oriented approach, seeking to offer the highest possible flexibility to their customers.
The algorithm in the backend is one of the most complex in e-commerce as Eldum Rétt offers a huge variety of flexible meal kits and provides state of the art customer engagement through push messages, SMS and emails. This was all enabled through the new technology stack.
From the client
“Eldum Rétt relies exclusively on selling products online. Therefore, user experience and reliability of the online store are paramount. We have full confidence in 1xINTERNET’s pragmatic problem solving abilities in every facet of web technology - ranging from hosting infrastructure, UI designing, backend- and frontend programming, all delivered with highly organized project management. 1xINTERNET has consistently demonstrated excellence and reliability in the aforementioned areas throughout the 5 years we’ve worked with them”.
Róbert Karl Lárusson, CTO
Main features of the project
Subscription service
The subscription capabilities of Eldum Rétt go way beyond the standard (from Amazon or the like). Any available product can be purchased and for each subscription the user can skip certain deliveries or pause them completely. The customer can also reactivate any subscription and the system will make sure that it picks up again at the correct intervals. Furthermore, all meals in a subscription will get packaged and delivered together.
Flexible meal kits and menus
Eldum Rétt allows the flexible configuration of meal kits. Not only are the amount of meals and people served flexible within configured constraints, but the system architecture in the backend is also flexible. It allows customers to rearrange ingredients within an established meal. These scenarios are quite complex, as pricing is subject to change on a per-order basis.
The ordering options have a higher level of complexity compared to competitors like HelloFresh, Blue Apron or Plated. The subscription and shipping systems are more flexible than those offered by Amazon.
Optimised packaging
Eldum Rétt uses a smart packing algorithm. The physical dimensions (width, height, depth, weight) of every product is stored in the system. The system also stores the available boxes "package sizes", and will dynamically calculate the optimal packing of a delivery and its shipping costs.
Customers also have the option to bundle orders in the cart into as few deliveries as possible or the greater flexibility of choosing different deliveries for each product. This takes into account the shipping availability of the products, such as whether home delivery is available. This may also vary based on the customer's postal code. Optimised packaging helps to preserve the environment and save money on shipping costs.
Flexible schedules
Eldum Rétt offers flexible scheduling options, including conventional week-to-week schedules (refreshed every Thursday with delivery the following week), same-week or same-day schedules, and schedules with extended buying periods of two weeks or longer with flexible delivery options. The system will automatically display available products and corresponding delivery options for the client.
Flexible places of delivery
Configuring the place of delivery is a popular option among customers. It is possible to arrange to have food delivered to a different address, for example when spending time in a summer house.
Step-by-step cooking instructions
Cooking instructions are delivered in a dynamically generated PDF included in the box. Customers can also access the instructions from the website or follow them step-by-step in the app. The instructions have undergone significant improvements compared to the previous system. They now contain detailed and structured information:
Cooking instructions with timers: The instructions are separated into steps, which feature exceptions depending on the serving size. Additionally, the calculation of the amount of ingredients required is fully dynamic, ensuring the instructions are correct for any serving size.
Nutrition facts and calories: All ingredients are stored with the declared amount of calories and nutritional information. This information is then dynamically calculated to provide the per-serving nutritional information, as well as to identify any existing allergens.
Other: Information about difficulty, user ratings and cooking time are also available to the user.
Taste profiles
The choices available for the customers of Eldum Rétt are extensive. One of the recent features is the possibility of entering your own taste profile. Not only can customers choose “vegetarian” or “vegan” but they can opt-out depending on their personal taste. An intelligent algorithm will preselect recipes based on the customer’s specific taste profile.
Pricing
Many people, particularly the younger generation, worry that subscription based services delivering fresh food boxes are expensive. At Eldum Rétt, customers can choose not to be shown premium priced meals.
Gift vouchers
Eldum Rétt has a growing customer base who want to share their culinary joy with friends and colleagues. To accommodate this, "gift vouchers" have been launched, allowing customers to choose a monetary amount and have the voucher issued. The backend takes into account the different tax rates on food and beverages.
Ancillary products
Eldum Rétt offers a great variety of ancillary products at the checkout, like desserts or food that fit a dedicated occasion.
Technical characteristics of the project
Migration
In the first stage of development, most of the available data from the old system had to be migrated into Eldum Rétt’s new environment. Migrating the data was a time consuming task due to the complex data structures, which required many on-the-fly mappings and resolution of dependencies. The process was further complicated by the sheer volume of data, with over a quarter of a million customer orders and a total of 1.2 million data sets to migrate. This migration had to happen seamlessly so that customers would get delivered an order which they had placed just a few hours earlier in the previous system.
API / OAuth
Eldum Rétt has vast API capabilities including APIs to existing backends, such as Social Media and the mobile app. OAuth ensures secure authentication and authorization on the platform (as well as on Facebook and the like). Furthermore, Eldum Rétt has GraphQL and a JSON:API built in, which allows literally any information to be extracted from the system. This is used by the app, which is running on React Native, and the headless commerce, but also allows any third party system to access the data in a flexible and secure way.
Search
Customer search data is only available to the manager and employees of the company. This is an important feature in the webshop as the whole order management takes place in the backend of the system. There are many different search pages in the system that use different facettes depending on the use case. For these extensive and complex scenarios in the backend modular API SolR order index search was used.
Notification system
Eldum Rétt features an advanced customer notification system. The system can send notifications regarding relevant events such as purchases, status changes, payments, pick-up reminders and more. For example, the first option would be to notify the customer via a push notification to the Eldum Rétt app. If the customer does not have the app, the next option could be an email. If the customer does not open the email for a certain period of time, an SMS would be sent.
For these reminders the messaging stack system was used, which allows flexible and multichannel notifications, such as push messages, SMS and email. Notifications are also presented to the customer in an activity log on the website and in the app.
Advanced Queue
Advanced queue is used wherever batch operations need to be performed and is particularly relevant for subscription related tasks.
Hosting
1xINTERNET has built an extremely resilient and scalable hosting infrastructure on Google Cloud Platform. The nature of Eldum Rétt’s business requires that the infrastructure scales by a factor of 10 in an instant.
"We really appreciate the way 1xINTERNET’s world class Drupal developers expertly adapted and implemented the Drupal Commerce module family to our unconventional use case in a way we can still leverage its full potential, especially subscriptions. Also the scalable/clustered web hosting infrastructure elegantly and cost-effectively handles the sudden and intense traffic spikes we face on a weekly basis".
Róbert Karl Lárusson, CTO
Winner of the International Splash Awards
In 2019, the solution won the International Splash Awards, an international award from an independent jury for successful projects developed with Drupal.
Why was Drupal a good fit for this project?
When Eldum Rétt contacted us in 2017, their system ran on Drupal 7. They were satisfied with the overall use of Drupal but required more insight and wanted to offer greater flexibility to their customers.
Today, Eldum Rétt runs on Drupal 9, which is a modern software framework that brings a lot of functionality out-of-the-box (world class CMS features and a very flexible commerce suite with Drupal Commerce). To accommodate the most demanding requests, we designed specialised functionality for this e-commerce solution. Thanks to Drupal being open source it was possible to develop the necessary additional functionalities. Drupal’s extendability through its APIs enabled Eldum Rétt to use Drupal as the main data store for all of its products, user data and order information. These can then be accessed through various customer interaction channels.
“Our company has experienced continuous growth each year by most metrics. Drupal has proven itself a solid foundation to grow and adapt with our business needs".
Róbert Karl Lárusson, CTO
