Recipe box subscription Gousto has hired eBay veteran, Murray Lambell, as chief customer officer, with the business looking to capture even more of the mainstream dinner market following a return to profitability last year.
A company profile in the SubX Subscription 2024 report looks at Gousto’s growth. Founded in 2012, Gousto had a bold ambition to change the way people shop and eat. Having worked long hours in the finance industry, Timo Boldt saw a gap in the market for healthy, convenient and sustainable home cooking and the idea for Gousto was born.
Off-the-shelf subscription technology didn’t exist so the team decided to build its own, allowing it to scale significantly and start innovating the product into the offering we know today.
From performance marketing in the early days to now brand building activity, to refer a friend offers, marketing channels have always been key to growing the Gousto customer base. “Early on we realised if we can make customer satisfaction amazingly high, we create this virtuous circle of great product, super happy customers who refer more friends, greater loyalty, higher order rates, which led us to invest more and more into product experience,” says Shaun Pearce, chief technology officer.
Gousto has a highly personalised menu. “Almost three quarters of all recipes bought by customers come from our top 15 personalised recipe recommendations” adds Pearce.
Gousto is the first recipe box to cater for one, two, three, four and five people, an update the company brought in in 2023. It has also just launched a four-person recipe box with five recipes. One key requirement for the Gousto menu planning tool is the ability to accurately forecast how many orders they get for each recipe.
The company runs a suite of models that forecast both the total number of boxes ordered per week and the recipes that will be contained in each box. “Our recommendations model is at the heart of our personalised customer experience, ranking our recipes so that we show customers the ones most relevant to them,” says Pearce, “We use a transformer-based architecture to learn from customer ordering behaviour and from our rich library of recipe information.”
The subscription economy will once again be the focus of panel, fireside chats and roundtables at RetailX Event’s Autumn Festival on 09 October 2024.
SubscriptionX II takes the form of an exclusive think-tank which will explore how leading subscription businesses and challenger brands are focussing on retention as a key driver of growth, using a data-driven approach to define and refine their strategy, and creating exceptional subscriber experiences to increase customer lifetime value.
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