Eldum Rétt, established in 2013, is the market leader in Iceland, providing a subscription-based food box service for home cooking. They pioneered this service in the country and lead in providing unparalleled flexibility in terms of subscription plans, food preferences, and delivery options to their clients. With a wide variety of recipes to choose from, they cater to every occasion, from a simple family dinner or an elaborate New Year's Eve feast. This service not only eliminates the hassle of grocery shopping but also minimises food waste since customers receive precisely what they need for each meal.

Over the past five years, Eldum Rétt has achieved double-digit growth rates, increasing revenue per meal and expanding their customer base by 30%. Today they deliver approximately 400,000 meals annually to households throughout Iceland. Remarkably, after only a decade, Eldum Rétt achieved an impressive yearly turnover of EUR 10,000,000 (ISK 1,544,000,000). Their business operations rely entirely on the system we developed for them in 2018, which we have continuously updated and upgraded to ensure optimal performance.

Eldum Rétt
Why Drupal was chosen: 

When Eldum Rétt first approached us in 2017, their system was operating on Drupal 7. Although satisfied with Drupal's overall functionality, they required more insight and sought to enhance the flexibility they offered customers.

Eldum Rétt's system has now been upgraded to Drupal 9, a contemporary software framework that offers a plethora of out-of-the-box features, including a world-class CMS and a highly flexible commerce suite through Drupal Commerce. To meet their most demanding requests, we developed specialised functionality for their e-commerce solution, leveraging the extensibility of Drupal's open-source platform. Using Drupal's APIs, Eldum Rétt can utilise the platform as their primary data store for all product, user, and order information, which can be accessed through various customer interaction channels.

This project won the International Splash Awards in 2019, an international award from an independent jury for successful projects developed with Drupal.

Describe the project (goals, requirements and outcome): 

Eldum Rétt was the first company in Iceland to offer a subscription based food delivery service and they aimed to offer the most advanced technological service to their clients. With a strong focus on customer satisfaction, they provide tailor-made options for subscriptions, food preferences, and delivery.

The original Eldum Rétt website developed in 2014 used Drupal 7 in combination with Drupal Commerce. As the business grew they needed to upgrade their digital infrastructure to cater to their new requirements. When Eldum Rétt contacted 1xINTERNET, their objective was to modernise their digital landscape and leverage the technical capabilities of their system and streamline their internal processes.  relies on their system's data to manage their daily operations and goes above and beyond to meet their clients' needs.

Their strategy was customer-orientated, with the goal of providing maximum flexibility to their customers. With a vast range of customizable meal kits and cutting-edge customer interaction via push notifications, SMS, and emails, they boast one of the most advanced e-commerce algorithms in the industry. All of this became possible with the adoption of their new technology stack.

Eldum Rétt website

Main features of the project

Subscription service 

Eldum Rétt's subscription capabilities far exceed the standard, surpassing the likes of Amazon and similar companies. Any available product can be purchased and subscribers have the flexibility to skip or pause certain deliveries. Customers can reactivate past subscriptions and the system ensures that it reactivates at the correct intervals. 

Flexible meal kits and menus

Eldum Rétt offers great flexibility when it comes to configuring meal kits. Customers can customise the number of meals and serving sizes within specific limits. Users can rearrange ingredients within a meal which presents complexity as pricing is subject to change on a per order basis. The options provided by Eldum Rétt are more complex and far reaching than competitors such as HelloFresh, Blue Apron, or Plated. The subscription and shipping systems are more versatile than those offered by Amazon.

Optimised packaging

Eldum Rétt employs an intelligent packaging algorithm that uses the physical attributes (width, height, depth, and weight) of each item stored in the system. Additionally, the system stores information about available box sizes and dynamically calculates the most efficient packaging and shipping costs for each delivery. Customers can choose to consolidate their orders to minimise the number of deliveries or select separate deliveries for each product, taking into account shipping availability and postal codes. This optimised packaging approach is not only environmentally friendly but also results in reduced shipping expenses.

Graphic showing the smart packaging system of Eldum Rétt

Flexible schedules & places of delivery

Eldum Rétt provides customers with various flexible scheduling options including conventional week-to-week schedules that refresh every Thursday with delivery the following week, same-week or same-day schedules, and schedules with extended buying periods of two weeks or more with adaptable delivery choices. The system will automatically showcase available products and corresponding delivery options for the client.

Delivery location is also customisable, this feature enables customers to have their food delivered to a different address, such as a summer house.

Step-by-step cooking instructions

Customers receive cooking instructions in a dynamically generated PDF included in the box or accessible from the website or app. The instructions have been improved and now contain detailed and structured information, such as step-by-step instructions with timers, per-serving nutrition facts and calories, and identified allergens. Additional information such as difficulty, user ratings, and cooking time are also provided.

Taste profiles

Eldum Rétt provides customers with an extensive range of options. One recent addition is the ability to create a personalised taste profile. In addition to selecting standard options such as "vegetarian" or "vegan," customers can also indicate their specific taste preferences. An intelligent algorithm then preselects recipes based on each customer's unique taste profile.

Gift vouchers

To meet the needs of its expanding customer base, Eldum Rétt has introduced "gift vouchers," which customers can purchase. The backend system considers the varying tax rates on food and beverages when issuing the voucher. This enables customers to share their love of cooking with friends and colleagues.

Supplementary products

Eldum Rétt provides customers with a wide range of additional products, such as desserts and food for specific occasions, which can be easily added to their order at checkout. 

Technical characteristics of the project

Migration

During the initial development, Eldum Rétt had to migrate a large amount of data from the old system to the new environment. This was a time-consuming task due to the complex data structures, which required on-the-fly mappings and resolution of dependencies. The migration process was further complicated by the volume of data, with over 250,000 customer orders and a total of 1.2 million data sets to transfer. It was crucial to ensure a seamless transition so that customers would receive their orders without any disruption, even if they had placed them just a few hours earlier in the previous system.

API / OAuth

Eldum Rétt's API capabilities are extensive and include integration with existing backends like Social Media and the mobile app. Secure authentication and authorization are ensured through OAuth, which is also used on platforms such as Facebook. Eldum Rétt has built-in support for GraphQL and JSON:API, allowing access to virtually any information in the system. This functionality is utilised by the React Native app and the headless commerce, and can also be leveraged by any third-party system to securely and flexibly access Eldum Rétt's data.

Search

Access to customer search data is restricted to Eldum Rétt's manager and employees, who manage orders using the system's backend. The backend features numerous search pages with different facets depending on the use case. To support these complex and extensive scenarios, Eldum Rétt employs the modular API SolR order index search.

Notification system

Eldum Rétt's advanced notification system sends notifications about purchases, status changes, payments, pick-up reminders and more via push notifications, email, and SMS. The messaging stack system enables flexible and multichannel notifications. Customers can view notifications in an activity log on the website and app.

Advanced Queue

Advanced queue is used wherever batch operations need to be performed and is particularly relevant for subscription related tasks.

Hosting

1xINTERNET built an extremely resilient and scalable hosting infrastructure on Google Cloud Platform. The nature of Eldum Rétt’s business requires that the infrastructure scales by a factor of 10 in an instant. 

Client quote:

Eldum rétt relies exclusively on selling products online. Therefore, user experience and reliability of the online store are paramount. We have full confidence in 1xINTERNET’s pragmatic problem solving abilities in every facet of web technology - ranging from hosting infrastructure, UI designing, backend- and frontend programming, all delivered with highly organised project management. 1xINTERNET has consistently demonstrated excellence and reliability in the aforementioned areas throughout the 5 years we’ve worked with them”.
Róbert Karl Lárusson, CTO

Technical specifications

Drupal version: 
Drupal 8.x
Why these modules/theme/distribution were chosen: 

Commerce 2 along with commerce recurring constitute the core of Eldum rétt’s Shop system. The modular and extensible API allows complex scenarios like those required by Eldum Rétt to be implemented.

Migrate was used to ensure a smooth transition between the old and the current system, more than a million entities were migrated.

The messaging stack allows flexible and multichannel notifications (push, SMS, email).

GraphQL and OAuth ensures the vast API capabilities for the application.

Advanced queue is used wherever batch operations need to be performed and is mostly relevant for subscriptions.

Community contributions: 

Contributed patches mostly for commerce and commerce recurring modules.

Organizations involved: 
Eldum Rétt screenshot from website showing recipe display options
Eldum Rétt screenshot from website showing meal options
Sectors: 
E-Commerce

Comments

philosurfer’s picture

I love all the customization to scheduling and packaging.
Drupal + Commerce FTW!

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We are the cult of personality.
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kieledein’s picture

A useful share for me right now. Thanks so much for your article