How might we revolutionize the bakery experience and provide a seamless experience for customers?
Visa Partnered with Safeway to engage in next generation retail experiences - starting with the bakery.
Safeway has a very loyal following of customers for its cakes. Customers currently need to go into a Safeway store to order a cake, flip though a dirty, grimy book, often missing pages or information, choose the cake, then dictate the order to a bakery employee. Items are often out of stock, or seasonal, and the wire bound book does not reflect.
In our Discovery Phase, we asked 20 customers to go into a Safeway store, order a cake, and convey their experience.
From this research we created empathy maps, clustered themes and built our key insights for our Ideation session with Safeway.
After a deep immersion into empathy maps, customer need and insights, we dove into the ideation session and arrived at some key themes.
The design phase we explored concepts based on the needs/outcomes of the session, and conducted another round of research with our initial set of participants to gauge desirability/feasibility.
The final prototype addressed the needs in 6 key moments, Size, Flavor, Theme, Personalization, Pickup, and Pay.
Additionally, the experience could easily be deployed in-store at a kiosk, or at home via a smartphone or tablet. We wanted to address the flexibility customers desired - some do prefer to go in and order, talk with the baker, get a sample. Others want to order without even going to the store, with confidence what they ordered is what they will get.
Write and get a preview of exactly what you want your cake to say... no more guess work and stress on the baker/decorator's part.
Choose your pickup day and time, and even have it scheduled so the cake can be delivered curbside to your car.
Customers need visual info on the cakes and fillings, as well as recommendations on pairings to make good choices, vs regret. We photographed all the variations of cake, icings, and fillings to build from in the app.
The final prototype was tested as a pilot in several stores in the country, as well as deployed by invitation only on smartphones for at home testing.
Outcome- Visa provided a detail springboard package on deployment in partnership with Safeway. Customers are enabled to easily order a cake for any holiday or celebration, personalize it, get recommendations, and pay for it all in one seamless, fun, engaging experience.
Additionally, bakery employees love the experience- it has reduced product waste and time lost on errors, wrong orders, mistakes in personalization, or items not in stock.