2024-10-07 16:22:16

Overview

Veritable Vegetable: Digital Transformation for the Oldest Organic Produce Distributor in the US

Veritable Vegetable is a values-based organic produce distributor launched in 1974 with the goal of building an equitable food system by supporting organic farmers, strengthening communities, and using the power of business to solve social and environmental challenges. The company, wanting to improve user experience for both producers and distributors, hired Free Range to conduct a design refresh of its out-of-date checkout process. 

After taking a close look at their current produce upload system, ordering system, and customer onboarding system, we provided design and tech recommendations to automate their systems and save many hours of manual labor. Staying true to the company's distinctive values, we also designed a brand that was fresh, sophisticated, and more mature than its previous iteration.

Understand

We began by meeting with Veritable Vegetable stakeholders to understand the opportunities and challenges a brand refresh presented for their organization.

Through numerous stakeholder interviews, we soon realized that Veritable Vegetable would need to upgrade key workflows within the company website in order to significantly improve user experience for producers and distributors. Accordingly, we assembled a team to help the company reimagine fundamental assets and processes such as its produce catalog, produce upload system, ordering system, customer onboarding system, etc.

 

Explore

Backed by a thorough understanding of Veritable Vegetable's needs, we got to work improving the company's website design and optimizing those processes most directly connected to business success. As the project unfolded, we maintained a high degree of communication between the client, the design team, and the development team, in order to prevent siloing and ensure that brand and infrastructure worked together smoothly.

Create

Project success for Veritable Vegetable meant an improved user experience for Veritable Vegetable customers—plus process automation for the Veritable Vegetable team. We worked closely with that team to provide appropriate process automation recommendations tied to the performance of their website. By building process automations as small, minimally viable products, we were able to gather critical customer feedback and pivot when necessary to get everything just right. 

Launch

The new website streamlined the user experience for customers and the Veritable Vegetable team. We continue to work closely with the company, managing their website updates and building out small features as part of a process of continuous improvement.