Small Kitchen To National Leader
Jayne Ritchie started Bodychef in 2002, before Carna was even a concept. Russell developed Carna by anticipating and reacting to the Bodychef’s needs.
Project summary
When Jayne Ritchie first started Bodychef Ltd in 2002, she ran a small local operation out of her kitchen in her home. After some great success, she quickly began to find out how difficult and time consuming it can be to run a food business, particularly one approaching a national level.
Jayne’s husband, Russell, decided to use his knowledge from decades in the computer game industry to build a specialist piece of software to help manage day-to-day operations within the Bodychef. From this, the first version of Carna, Carna v1.0 was born.
The Development
Through dissecting the operations of the business, they were able to pinpoint the areas that most needed automation, allowing them to take a proactive approach to building the perfect software for a food business. In addition to wanting to track orders, suppliers and required ingredients, Russell was also very aware of the growing importance of the internet in people’s daily lives. He and his team set out to create a way for customers to customise their diet plan and order online.
Proven Results
Bodychef still uses Carna to this day, albeit a more modernised version. It has allowed them to not only survive through a harsh economic climate but dominate the industry with far fewer staff than would be required under normal circumstances. Carna’s organisational benefits have helped the Bodychef to earn an extraordinary record for successful deliveries and serve thousands of happy customers.
Carna has also been integral in the Bodychef achieving SALSA certification and partnering with retail giants Ocado and QVC. We developed a special version of Carna specifically for QVC, you can read more below.
QVC Carna® Live 4th Jan 2019
The NutriSolve team developed a bespoke system to meet the requirements of QVC and The Bodychef, the system is the first external microsite ever used by QVC in the Uk, All clients are imported directly from the QVC ordering system. As clients purchase, Carna-QVC automatically populates the purchased credits and communicates directly with each customer, inviting them to customers and book their eating plan, The bodychef runs three productions a week for the QVC contact.
Overnight Success For Brand
Bodychef acquired MY Food Ltd in 2018. MY Food was already an established diet delivery company with a large and complex menu. While MY Food was an establish brand and website, their SIXPAX site had been abandoned to focus on their primary website and brand.
Project summary
In order to accommodate an entirely new menu on top of their existing business, Bodychef would need to increase their ability to handle orders. An additional complication was the fact that MY Food did not only sell meal plans – their customers would purchase meal packs and even single meals too. Bodychef realised that continuing custom of a significant percentage would be dependent on customers being able to order in the manner they were used to.
The Development
Rather than hire another kitchen team as would be normal in such a situation, Nutrisolve created another system for Bodychef, an adapted version of 7Day Carna, which was developed previously for use with QVC. Nutrisolve use this as one arm of Bodychef’s MY Food operation, while building a completely new front-end for the sales of individual meals.
Proven Results
The take over of all operations took around one month and required no additional staff members or extra space. In fact the acquisition of MY Food took place at a time when the Bodychef were downsizing their facilities as a result of their efficiency! MY Food customers were impressed with the cooking of the food under new management and the Bodychef also revived the SIXPAX brand, creating a website within that time which was on the first page of google almost immediate – we believe this is at least in part due to the rich dynamic content Carna generates for their website.
Family Meal Planning App
Carna has typically used its technology to help businesses better serve their customers, however in 2016 Russell and his team created a B2C offering to show consumers how to manage their diet like the professionals.
Project summary
The concept was simple, create an application which allows customers to create their own meal plan and shopping list automatically with their statistics and preferences. The most demanding aspect of this development was the goal of being able to create a perfect meal plan not just for one person but for an entire family.
The Development
Using existing functionality from Carna, the Nutrisolve team created Circles, the ultimate diet planning app. A large amount of customer eating patterns were added to reflect real world situations and flexible eating. Weigh in reminders were created to keep customers on track and new calculations were developed to convert common cooking into metric units allowing for nutritional reporting with extreme precision. The app would allow for customers to plan four different diet plans at varying calorie levels with different preferences or from different templates. Shopping lists and recipes would be automatically generated for the customers.
Proven Results
Circles was launched in late-2016 under the Feed My Family Fresh App. The team achieved their goal of creating an app for the entire family and every feature was realised. The app is available in the App Store and on Google Play for iOS and android devices respectively.