Case Study: Launching a Sun Basket Branded Magazine
At Sun Basket, meteoric growth meant compounding fulfillment challenges with recipe cards in food packing facilities. Here’s how George and his team facilitated a solution that eliminated pack errors, reduced costs, and enhanced customer and brand experience.
The challenges of printing and packing recipe cards:
Company Challenges: Individual recipe cards were causing major headaches in Sun Basket pack facilities. With custom orders, and lack of automation, collateral was being hand collated which led to labor inefficiencies and errors. In addition, due to shifting forecasts, recipe card inventory was frequently short or long leading to waste as well as disruptive, last-minute print runs.
Customer Experience Challenges: Due to pack errors, customers were occasionally receiving incorrect or missing cards, effectiely driving up customer service requests and dissatisfaction in the service as a whole. In addition, the available real estate on our smaller cards restricted the amount of information that could be shared with home cooks.
The answer: A recipe magazine, aka The Sun Times
Aggregating all recipes in one magazine immediately solved a number of the above described scaling issues.
For customers: Eliminating card errors drove down customer complaints. In addition, the magazine included bonus recipes, articles about heath and wellness, food culture, and other brand focused materials. Unique themes were developed and showcased for each delivery week. Over a million magazines were delivered in the first year and became popular collectables that could later be found on EBay.
For the company: With no cards to collate for specialized orders, the pack process simplified dramatically and errors were eliminated. Labor previously assigned to sorting cards could now be focused elsewhere in the facility. The customer service saw a dramatic reduction in user complaints. Print waste and over and under-run costs were cut, and pack lines were no longer held up to accommodate emergency printing.
Inside the Sun Times Magazine
