My Muscle Chef puts personalisation on the menu

Seven years ago, My Muscle Chef co-founder and CEO Tushar Menon was busy working and studying and looking to save time on meal preparation when he identified a gap in the ready-made food market.

While there were services catering to weight management, no one provided a high-protein solution for people like Menon who wanted to fuel his workouts. Confident that this was something that would appeal to others, he founded My Muscle Chef along with his brother and Chief Technology Officer Nishant Menon.

What was initially a side-hustle targeting customers from local gyms, My Muscle Chef is now a thriving small business selling over 450,000 meals a week to customers across Australia. The company is also evolving to provide customers with a more complete offering, including snacks, meals, and drinks designed for different nutritional needs.

Salesforce is helping My Muscle Chef drive this next phase of growth through the delivery of a more personalised customer experience.

In its third year of business, My Muscle Chef jumped from a million dollar company to a five million dollar company by opening up digital advertising. In the next year, it hired its first marketer and doubled its sales to $10 million. Throughout this time, it remained focused on the gym channel, but its potential market was much larger.

“The biggest turning point for our business was when we stopped to really understand our customers. We engaged a research house and mined all of the data we’d collected, and the results showed that our customers were not all gym enthusiasts, but everyday consumers,” said Tushar Menon.

This finding opened the co-founders’ eyes to the opportunity ahead and they set out to refresh the My Muscle Chef brand and strengthen its sales and marketing capabilities. The company needed a platform that would help it scale, and unlock its data to deliver a more personalised customer experience.

As a digital-first business, the online experience was key and My Muscle Chef implemented Commerce Cloud and Marketing Cloud to power a new website and nurture customers through every possible channel.

“We want to move away from being a transactional business to become a lifestyle business and one of the ways we can do that is through personalisation,” said Nishant Menon. “Having the right data, and the tools to manage it is crucial and that’s where Salesforce comes in.”

My Muscle Chef has taken what it has  learned about its customers and used Commerce Cloud to create a more personal and seamless online experience. Its new website includes meal plans tailored to different goals as well as a tool that customers can use to build their own. The website also features a streamlined checkout process which has helped to reduce abandoned checkouts and increase conversion by 45% year-on-year.

Another benefit of the website is that, along with Marketing Cloud, it provides My Muscle Chef with new insights on customers that can be used to personalise and optimise their experience even more.

For example, in the future, My Muscle Chef could leverage Einstein and draw on customers’ past orders to provide recommendations on what they should order next.

The new website launched in May 2020 just as many people were at home due to COVID-19 and searching for healthy and convenient delivery options. “We experienced a spike in online traffic during the pandemic and thanks to the scale of Commerce Cloud everything worked smoothly. That peace of mind that comes with not worrying about infrastructure or scale is huge and also frees us up to focus on the list of things we want to deliver in the future,” said Nishant Menon.

The Salesforce Premier Success team has been proactive in helping My Muscle Chef optimise its use of the platform. For example, the team has delivered training on best practices and introduced My Muscle Chef to new features to help the business improve the customer experience and continue its strong growth.

My Muscle Chef is now personalising more of its content and building out a range of journeys using Marketing Cloud. These include a new prospecting journey to engage those wanting to get healthy for summer as well as an order reminder journey. The reminder journey is aimed at encouraging customers to update their meal plan so that they can enjoy greater variety and stick with the plan for longer. This will help the company to reduce the risk of churn and build on the 40% increase in online revenue generated in the last six months alone.

“By shifting our strategy and using Salesforce to unlock our data, we were able to increase sales and subscribers in just eight weeks. Now, by using greater personalisation, we can build on that to increase loyalty and customer lifetime value,” said Tushar Menon.