We’re all familiar with grocery shopping. You venture into your nearby supermarket, walk down all the aisles and start filling your basket with the things you need (and sometimes don’t need). But what you might not be aware of is that grocery shopping is a task which requires you to make a myriad of smaller decisions, ranging from easy to extremely difficult ones that leave you wandering aisles for much longer than you’d ideally like to.

The easy groceries require little cognitive load to make a decision, think of snacks, breakfast, lunch, and your bathroom utilities. You tend to stick to the same types of products her; because you’re not eating a different kind of granola everyday, you don’t have to spend an unnecessary amount of time deciding.

And then there’s the more challenging tasks such as gathering everything for dinner, which require a significant amount of cognitive load. Sometimes, you step into the store without a clear plan, while other times you go knowing what you want to cook. Either way, shopping for dinner often feels like a puzzling task with a lot of smaller considerations. If you’re cooking for a large household, for instance, you’re factoring in dietary restrictions, family sizes, budget, nutrition goals, and preparation time. Balancing all these factors can quickly become overwhelming, resulting in the frustration many of us are familiar with.

At Picnic, we’re on a mission to simplify grocery shopping, and a huge part of that is reducing the decisions customers need to make. This article dives into our journey of developing the Picnic Meal Planner — a tool within our app that simplifies the meal planning process for a week’s worth of meals.

Listening to our customers

One of the reasons we started looking into our meals offering was to better understand our customer journey and to identify opportunities for improvement in this area. By gathering qualitative insights from frequent conversations, our dedicated researchers were able to shape our understanding of how our customers plan their meals. These insights allowed us to challenge our existing assumptions. While some were proven to be correct, some turned out to be inaccurate.

For instance, in the early stages there was a general belief most people wanted to experiment with new recipes, but our conversations with customers proved quite the contrary. Turns out that our most important audience, families, often rotate between a set of recipes that they already know. This wasn’t because they lack interest in variety, but because familiar meals meant familiar outcomes; happy faces at the dinner table and a reliable evening schedule with no surprises in the kitchen. A valuable insight that shaped decisions later on.

Design principles

Gradually, we were getting a better grip on what the customer journey looked like and spotted opportunities for us to improve on along the way. Over time, our findings distilled into three core design principles:

Simplicity
Planning meals is a complex task, in part because of the number of choices you have to make as a customer. Most online platforms offer an endless array of recipes, but that doesn’t necessarily help customers in decision-making, as the phenomenon of choice paralysis can result in overanalyzing and consequently lead to delayed action.

Although our store offers thousands of recipes, we knew we needed to simplify this by:

1. Intuitive browsing: create an intuitive way for you to browse through this large offering, with logical grouping of recipes, such as theme or category-based browsing.
2. Tailored suggestions: displaying recipes that are tailored to each individual palate, focusing only on meaningful choices.

Flexibility
Daily life of a parent is volatile, with frequent changes on all sides. Your son might suddenly end up eating at home on Tuesday or there is an urgent meeting on Thursday which causes you to eat outside. Things change, constantly, and our meal planner needs to accommodate such a lifestyle. For example by allowing for last-minute changes to your meal plan up to 24 hours before delivery.

Personalization
Preferences can vary widely, especially in young families. Some prefer rice over pasta, and some vegetables over meat. Our goal was to create a tool that takes the tastes of everyone in the household into regard, not just the person placing the order. After months of research and testing, we’ve developed a preferences flow that encompasses the need of an entire household, ensuring that your personalized suggestions are truly meaningful.

A new way to plan and shop

With all the insights in place, we’ve built the meal planner around these three design principles, aiming to create a tool that simplifies one of the most time-consuming tasks that families are faced with today.

Customers can now open our app and effortlessly plan a weeks worth of meals, by browsing through the personalized suggestions that fit their unique palate, or make last-minute changes to their meal plan when life throws them a curveball.

Recipes are also fully customizable allowing customers to add their own touch to their staples, and reordering favourite recipes has never been easier with it’s dedicated space in the app now.

By focusing on simplicity, flexibility, and personalization, we’ve transformed the dreadful task of figuring out what to eat into a time-efficient and enjoyable experience.

Changing the game

Thanks to our team and nearly a year of hard work, after hundreds of conversations with customers, countless design iterations and some pivots along the way; our team was able to create something that we’ve observed is truly helpful to our customers.

At Picnic, we believe that shopping isn’t just about picking up items; it’s about supporting the routines of daily life. Our meal planner is just one step in our mission to streamline grocery shopping for busy families, freeing up time and mental space for what truly matters.

So the work doesn’t stop here. Moving forward we’ll continue to evolve the meal planner by gathering more customer feedback, hopefully identifying more ways to simplify life in the kitchen. After all, planning meals should be a fun and enjoyable task — not a source of stress.