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 eating exciting and accessible. 18 months after their launch, the company was off to a strong start with significant buzz and enthusiastic customers. However, without a dedicated engineering or product team in place, they were experiencing serious growing pains with their technology. They weren’t able to launch the customer features they needed and they didn't have a strong enough platform or infrastructure to support and scale their business.

Stabilization and scale

The company saw that to succeed, they needed a technology team and platform that would grow with them. That’s where our partnership began. Our first focus was to stabilize and upgrade the existing technology. We refined the technical architecture and increased the capacity of the platform for future scaling. We then began adding the critical features to ensure their business processes could scale, improve margins, and capture the right customer data.

Building the next stage roadmap and features

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 expanded Purple Carrot's Whitespectre team to include UI/UX design and trained and mentored their newly added Product Managers. Together, we made inceptions, prototyping, hypothesis-driven development, and multi-variate testing key parts of the product development process.

The results from these changes were swift, with the company achieving major retention and acquisition improvements within the first months of new feature rollouts. Over the next year, the team improved and achieved further gains from the new customer features while continuing to scale the platform. We also enhanced the data collection and infrastructure, strengthening Purple Carrot's product insights and supporting critical marketing initiatives.

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 GreenfieldPresident and COO, Purple Carrot

Rapid growth to acquisition - and beyond

The first 18 months of our partnership fueled a period of exceptional growth, with Purple Carrot achieving three consecutive quarters of over 50% gains and establishing itself as a leader in plant-based meal kits. This strong momentum led to their $30 million acquisition in May 2019.

Throughout this period and for the following four years, Whitespectre remained Purple Carrot’s sole development and primary UI/UX partner. We continued to provide crucial support in Product Management, helping them expand their PM team while bridging gaps with senior Whitespectre PMs. During the COVID-19 pandemic, our platform adapted dynamically to meet an extraordinary surge in demand. Later, we helped them drive significant AOV increases through new product offerings and a native mobile app.

In 2023, after 8 years of collaboration, we worked closely with Purple Carrot to support their successful transition to an in-house development team. Overall, the Whitespectre-Purple Carrot journey underscores the impact of a true technology partnership, with results that carry forward into their future.