How Pure Plate ramped up delivery to manage spikes in demand
Fine dining delivered to your door
New York is known for its diverse and delicious street food, but this smorgasbord of choice isn’t reflected in the meal subscription services available in the city. Frustrated by the cheap and poor-quality monthly meal services on offer, Pure Plate decided to offer something better.
Pure Plate's competition all appeared to be in a race to the bottom over price, so It went high when the competition went low. Their private chef meal subscription service uses premium, locally sourced ingredients and maintains strict nutritional standards to cook macro-balanced fresh meals that are delivered to the doorstep.
Their high standards are reflected in each aspect of the business. They use chefs from Michelin-starred restaurants to devise and cook their weekly menu and package all their meals in cook-safe glass containers, which they collect, clean, and reuse to reduce plastic waste.
Their kitchen is based in Queens, and they make weekly deliveries across the city. Initially, they considered using existing DoorDash drivers for this, but it didn’t work logistically with collecting their glass meal containers, so they took on route planning themselves using local knowledge and freelance drivers.
Grouping deliveries by up-town and down-town regions appeared to work well enough, to begin with, but frustration arose when drivers were crisscrossing each other, and inquiries always spiked on delivery days with customers asking for updates on their delivery status
“I know it shouldn't take 4 hours for somebody to do ten stops, but it's because we had people's routes crisscrossing"Time to scale or fail
Pure Plate was proving a popular service, and demand steadily grew organically until a viral tweet in November 2023 increased their orders and deliveries by almost 10X overnight.
This unexpected growth put immediate pressure on their manual last-mile delivery process, so they looked for an alternative solution. They needed something they could onboard into their business quickly and easily and learn on the fly, and that’s when they found Circuit for Teams.
“The nice thing about Circuit is that it stays consistent and scales perfectly with our operations"Using Circuit, they wanted to solve three core problems. Firstly, they wanted to eliminate the number of customer inquiries on delivery days by providing accurate ETAs and delivery tracking.
Secondly, provide a better experience for their freelance drivers as complaints about poor routes and difficult dispatcher-to-driver communication channels were putting off drivers from taking on Pure Plate work.
Thirdly, find an easier way to cope with redistributing stops to other routes if drivers fail to show up or call off sick.
With Circuit for Teams, Pure Plate’s customer experience has been much smoother. Automatically triggered notifications now inform them when their delivery is due to arrive and allow recipients to leave specific instructions for the driver when their address is hard to find.
Dispatch was no longer bombarded with customers requesting tracking updates, and drivers felt the benefit of efficient and optimized routes, which significantly reduced their driving time.
The stats speak for themselves
Pure Plate’s delivery process was almost instantly elevated, and over time, the real impact of this change on the business could be measured.
Previously, they had an issue with freelance drivers skipping deliveries if they proved too tricky and returning the undelivered food back to the kitchen. This damaged the brand’s reputation with customers and led to wasted food and additional overheads.
Using Circuit for Teams, which provides delivery transparency across the route for recipient and dispatcher, has meant that they have managed to improve the delivery success rate by around 20%. Failed deliveries are almost a thing of the past, and when they do occur, they are typically due to factors beyond Pure Plate’s control.
One of the most noticeable improvements is the reduction in customer inquiries and time spent managing requests for delivery updates. Inbound customer contact has been reduced by roughly 70% because dynamic time windows and recipient notifications keep recipients informed in real time. It’s not unusual for delivery drivers to be delayed in a busy, vibrant city like New York. Road closures due to street events like marathons and parades are common in the summer, but any delays are now automatically communicated.
Driver retention has also improved. The user experience that the Circuit for Teams driver app provides is slick and seamless, keeping Pure Plate drivers coming back week after week. When a driver does fail to arrive, redistributing their stops between the rest of the team is much easier than before and can be accomplished in a few clicks. Gone are the days of wrangling spreadsheets and looking at a map.
“It reduced our delivery times by almost 50%. It's quite staggering”Beyond the plate
Pure Plate’s top-quality approach to creating and running a private chef meal delivery service is going down a treat, and they don’t plan on stopping there.
Their aim is to expand their range to breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks to own every customer's daily calorie share. Loyal customers trust them to create healthy, nutritious, high-welfare food, and in the future, they want to leverage that brand loyalty to improve other aspects of personal health. They plan to partner with ethically aligned brands to introduce plastic and chemical-free personal care products to the mix to further their mission to help their customers eat well and live well for longer.
Note: Circuit for teams is saving thousands of businesses at least 20% on delivery costs. Try it free for 7 days.
