Purple Carrot: 3x Growth to Acquisition

Meal kits with a mission

Purple Carrot disrupted the meal kit space with a mission to make plant-based exciting and accessible for meal kit subscribers. 18 months after their launch, the company was off to a strong start with a lot of buzz and positive reviews from their growing customer base. However, having begun their journey without a full-time engineering or product team in place, they were also starting to experience serious growing pains with their technology and weren’t able to launch the new features and branding they needed to grow their customer base.

Stabilization and scale

The company saw that to succeed long-term they needed a technology team and platform that could grow with them. That’s where our partnership began. At the beginning of our engagement, our team focused first on stabilizing and upgrading the existing platform. We refined the technical architecture and increased the capacity of the platform for future scaling. We then began adding the critical features to improve margins, ensure their business processes could scale, and capture the right customer data.

Becoming a product-led organization

Once these foundational pieces were in place, we worked with the executive team to formalize their roadmap process and develop their product strategy. In parallel, we also trained and mentored the Purple Carrot product managers, added UI/UX designers to Purple Carrot’s Whitespectre team, and worked with the company to make inceptions, prototyping, and multi-variate testing key parts of the product development process.
The results from these changes were swift, with the company displaying related retention and acquisition improvements within the first months post-release. Over the next year, the team grew and developed, then optimized multiple new features in these areas. They did this in parallel with continuing to scale the platform, improving the data collection and analysis tools, and supporting critical marketing initiatives.

Rapid growth to acquisition

These first 18 months of working together culminated a period of rapid growth - three consecutive quarters of over 50% growth- marking Purple Carrot as a leader in the meal kit industry for sustained growth. In June 2019, the company was acquired for $30 million.

During this time and to the present day, Whitespectre has remained the sole development and UI/UX partner for Purple Carrot. The team has continued to grow and evolve with the business, as Purple Carrot has built their product and business intelligence ‘muscles’ to become a truly data-driven, user-centric organization with a strong roadmap process. We’re proud of our role in helping them achieve such growth and a successful acquisition.

Whitespectre has been our technology partner for almost 4 years, acting as in-house development team. That partnership has enabled us to focus on growing our business with the confidence of knowing we had a powerhouse tech team behind us. Nick and Allison have also been trusted advisors over the years, helping us build and strengthen our roadmapping, design process, and product team, who work hand-in-hand with the developers. Overall, Whitespectre has been a terrific asset and helped us reach major milestones in our business, including our recent acquisition.

- Brian Greenfield, President & COO, Purple Carrot