A STARTUP JOURNEY

Growing up, my parents always told me to never open a restaurant. They knew the trials, tribulations and hardships of opening a restaurant. The constant worry of monthly payments adding up and not only whether or not we’d survive as a business, but as a family of immigrants in this new country we’d call home.

And the data backs up my parents claim; 3 out of 5 restaurants fail within the first year of operation. There’s many reasons for these failures, but as new immigrants of the Greater Boston area, this was the only playbook. Pool enough money to open up a Chinese restaurant and pray that we survive and make enough to retire and hopefully pass on a little bit to the next generation.

As luck would have it, the location they chose and the timing of opening Seven Star Mandarin House was a blessing. Located in the suburbs of Boston with a considerable Jewish population (see Jewish-American patronage of Chinese Restaurants), the restaurant took off as a neighborhood favorite just as Chinese cuisine was hitting the American palette.

While the restaurant has been closed for over twenty years, the memories of the food and the people still live on. And who would’ve thought spending that much time playing & working in a family restaurant would help my own business venture down the line.

ONE BOX
ENDLESS POSSIBILITIES

Fast forward to summer 2020 - a time of profound change, political upheaval and of course a worldwide pandemic. As the world stayed home, businesses and especially restaurants began to close and my future co-founder and I began to question the status quo and wondering if there was anything we could do to help them.

The problem: Restaurants are in trouble - The pandemic has triggered changes in eating habits that will continue to challenge the food industry once the pandemic is over.

The solution: Help create a new revenue stream in the home cooking market - By offering the home cook an attractive alternative, restaurants can grab share from a new market that is large and incremental.

MARKETPLACE PLATFORM

In order to create a standardized solution to this problem, we needed to create a marketplace platform where not only restaurants and customers could meet but also couriers thus creating a three sided marketplace platform setting up a flywheel effect.

By being the marketplace we would be able to better control the customer experience by standardizing packaging, recipe cards, branding and more. Furthermore, we would be able to have a centralized location for data to extract from, hopefully leading to potential sales channels and an overall better customer, vendor and courier experience.

CONSUMER TARGET & INSIGHT

We tried all the existing meal kits out there to experience them for ourselves and try to understand where we could improve on existing packaging, delivery, presentation and overall experience.

Based on our research and user interviews, we began to see that our target customers were 25-45 year old busy working professionals that make over ~$100,000 a year. As we started to ramp up operations, we simultaneously began positioning our EatMise kits as a premium restaurant meal kit lifestyle brand available for delivery to all Manhattan residents and workers.

Ultimate takeaway: Customers want home cooked meals that are high-quality and they want them fast.

NOT JUST A MEAL KIT

Meal kits had already existed before we came into the scene. You might have heard of Blue Apron or Hello Fresh. And while those are great, you’re still getting an entire carrot and onion that’ll take time to slice, chop and marinate for a recipe that may or may not be any good.

We wanted to eliminate the prep work of cooking and provide guaranteed delicious recipes, by partnering with well-known Manhattan restaurants (and beyond) and providing their signature dishes for the user to experience and quickly cook at home. Chef prepped, pan-ready ingredients, house-made sauces and easy recipes. Not just a meal kit, it's an EatMise kit. 

FROM MISE TO EATMISE

Mise en place (French pronunciation: [mi zɑ̃ ˈplas]) is a French culinary phrase which means "putting in place" or "gather". It refers to the setup required before cooking.

This name and concept was the foundation of our product and startup. While the company began as ‘mise’, it was brought to our attention that the term may not be as ubiquitous as first theorized. After much deliberation the collective decision was made to update the company name to ‘EatMise’. As this was a brand new product in the food space, we thought that adding the word ‘eat’ in front would immediately give consumers the connotation that this was a food based product/platform.

BRANDING

From the outset, my vision for EatMise was to craft something that would hopefully be classic and timeless as I’ve found those ideas to last the longest. Using a bold sans-serif font in all lowercase for the wordmark was a deliberate choice to imbue a friendly tone while also trying to stand out a bit from all the incumbents in the F&B industry. 

Subsequently I began to design and develop the ‘EM’ monogram. Drawing inspiration from the fashion industry, I ended up rotating two ‘m’ letters 90 degrees towards each other while trimming the left ‘m’ to create the ‘e’ and playing with the spacing between the two letters. The end result was a sleek ‘EM’ monogram that allowed for ample opportunity for future branding and marketing placement.

THE USER EXPERIENCE

The user journey starts with a visit to the EatMise website. Going through multiple iterations of design and development, we actually started our platform on Shopify.

As our business needs quickly outgrew the Shopify walls, we decided to use WordPress next as they provided more customization and flexibility with future development we foresaw down the line. 

As we launched the new site through Wordpress, we began to use a third party to audit and optimize our UX/UI, figuring a brand new set of eyes would be necessary to be as objective as possible.

AN ENGINEERED CUSTOMER JOURNEY

Every step is thoughtfully crafted for customer convenience, data & growth. As we didn’t have the funds to run a full mobile app, we tried to work around this issue by offering a text based concierge service. Every Sunday we would text recommendations for your meal kits based on user dietary preferences as well as giving you the option to skip the week for whatever reason. Along with the text message service we would also send out weekly Sunday emails with the same content.

THE EATMISE EXPERIENCE

From the beginning, our restaurant meal kit product was a hit. We figured out how to reach restaurants and began our process of on-boarding a curated selection of restaurants and their signature dishes. Part of the on-boarding process would be photography of the final dishes taken on location and meeting with the chef/manager/owner to go over their recipes and ingredients. I would then take the ingredients home armed with my notes to shoot and edit the recipe card. As the recipe was vetted by our team and approved by the restaurant, the dish would be uploaded to our site and ready to be ordered.

One of our highly regarded assets was actually our recipe cards. These cards were extremely helpful during the sales process; seeing an actual recipe card with your dish on it helped restaurants see meal kits come to life. We tried to keep a maximum of 5 steps to simplify the cooking process as well as having numbers on the ingredients packages to correspond to the step you’ll be using each ingredient. In terms of a future experience, I had ideas of digital versions of the recipe cards integrated with Alexa & Siri. You would call up the recipe on your device and Alexa/Siri would walk you through the steps with voice while calling up accompanying videos in case you needed a visual on a specific step or technique for the recipe.

Visit the EatMise shop page to see more recipe cards.

MINI MISE

One of our most successful marketing initiatives was the Mini Mise box. As a new product that needed some explaining, we thought that a miniature version of our product as a little take-home gift would be a great idea in helping customers understand who we are. Obviously with a box that small, we wouldn’t be able to fit an entire meal, so we opted for a family friendly s’mores kit. Each box included graham crackers, a marshmallow, chocolate and a recipe card - just like one of our regular meal kits!

It was a unanimous hit everywhere we went. We always had a crowd curious about what was in the box and often convinced passers-by to subscribe to EatMise just to get a freebie s’mores kit!

FASHION, FOOD & FUN

As our marketing events grew, so did the evolution of the Mini Mise box. We were invited to throw an after-party for New York Fashion Week for EMG Models. And so we turned to Buddha Bar, one of our platform’s restaurants, to co-host the after-party for EMG Models. As we scrambled to finalize details, I was able to evolve the Mini Mise box as a fashion accessory accompany the night’s festivities.

We also continued to hold food events inviting influencers and other brands to help cross-promote and market their products and services as well. Check out some of our event highlights in the videos below.