Food commerce · Live at public rollout · Apr 2020

Selling fresh food when the markets shut.

When the 2020 lockdown closed physical markets in Lagos, Farmcrowdy Foods combined app, WhatsApp and phone ordering with visible MeatHub pickup locations so households could order fresh food they could trust.

Role

Head of Marketing & Product Development

Timeline

2020

Company

Farmcrowdy

The access problem

The lockdown created a specific, urgent food-access problem: physical markets were closed or unsafe, hygiene concerns were high, and most households had never ordered fresh meat online. The product had to earn first-time trust in a category where freshness and handling are exactly what a website cannot show.

Before the storefront, the category had to be understood

Buying meat online was not ordinary behaviour for this audience, and the research said so plainly. The work started off-screen — visits to local abattoirs and conversations with the people who sell meat — before a survey went out to young professionals and housewives. 295 people took part in the survey overall.

Individual questions were answered by different numbers of people, so each finding carries its own denominator. Of the 268 who answered where they buy meat, 73.9% used local markets, 17.5% bought directly from an abattoir, 7.5% used a supermarket and roughly 1.1% bought online. Asked how open they were to buying meat online, those same 268 split three ways: 29.5% open, 32.5% not open, 38.1% indifferent.

Then the contradiction that made the project interesting. Among the 237 people who answered the fulfilment question, 70.5% preferred home delivery, 15.6% wanted to collect and 13.9% had no strong preference as long as the food arrived.

So the audience wanted the thing online retail is good at without yet trusting the category it belonged to. That is a design brief rather than a demand signal, and it set the constraints: category, cut, pack size, price and fulfilment all had to be stated explicitly enough to stand in for the seller who would normally be in front of you, and delivery had to be designed as part of the product rather than as the last step of a checkout.

Archived 2020 Farmcrowdy Foods research board: the method, a 295-participant sample split by gender and age, and nine charts covering purchase channel, bulk buying, spend, meat type, openness to buying online, reasons for the current channel, delivery preference and purchase factors. — The 2020 research board. The overall sample was 295 participants, but the questions were answered by different numbers of people — 268 on purchase channel and online openness, 237 on fulfilment.

Chart from the research board: where people buy meat — local market 73.9%, directly from an abattoir 17.5%, supermarket 7.5%, online a green sliver of roughly 1.1%. — Where do you buy meat? 268 responses. The online sliver is the whole problem in one chart.

Chart from the research board: openness to buying meat online — indifferent 38.1%, not open 32.5%, open 29.5%. — How open are you to buying meat online? 268 responses. Fewer than a third were positively open to the category.

Chart from the research board: preferred fulfilment — brought to my house or office 70.5%, pickup point 15.6%, no preference as long as it arrives 13.9%. — Preferred fulfilment, 237 responses — and the contradiction: the same audience that did not trust the category overwhelmingly wanted it delivered.

Meet people on the channel they already trust

Rather than forcing every customer through one app, ordering ran across the channels people already used — the app, WhatsApp and phone — backed by the same fulfilment operation. Visible MeatHub pickup locations anchored the service in physical places customers could verify, which mattered more for trust than any interface element.

The design work was making those channels feel like one service: consistent product information, consistent order confirmation, and clear expectations about preparation, hygiene and pickup or delivery.

Full Farmcrowdy Foods landing page: hero, food categories, an explanation of how the service works and prompts to order through the app or by phone. — The archived landing page carried the whole proposition on one scroll — what the service was, what could be ordered, and how to start an order without the app.

Farmcrowdy Foods onboarding screen with produce photography and the message “Provides Convenience”. — Onboarding led with convenience — the one thing a closed market could not offer.

Farmcrowdy Foods category browser asking “What are you getting today?” over grains, vegetables, poultry and fruit categories. — Category browsing kept the market’s own vocabulary rather than an invented taxonomy.

Farmcrowdy Foods rice product page showing price, selectable weights, a quantity control and an add-to-basket action. — The product detail state made pack size, quantity and price explicit before anything reached the basket — the seller’s job, done by the interface.

Result

Farmcrowdy Foods launched publicly in April 2020. The September 2020 company profile recorded 3,567 unique orders, 831 unique customers and $33,000 in transaction revenue. These are company figures attributed to that profile; they describe the operation the design work supported, not the isolated effect of any one screen or channel.

complex-systems

Next case study

When the icon set has six clouds and no danfo.