We brought Sakara to iPhone, streamlining meal planning and shopping and increasing customer engagement.
Sakara is a plant-based meal delivery service that has been nourishing customers since 2012. From vegan harvest bowls and salads to functional snacks and supplements, Sakara delivers ready-to-eat, chef-crafted meals to doorsteps nationwide. Looking to expand their customer experience, Sakara partnered with Fueled to create their first mobile app: a best-in-class iPhone experience that makes healthy living effortless.
Serving A Mobile-First Audience
Despite Sakara’s tech-savvy, on-the-go clientele, the company had no mobile app, relying only on its website for interactions. This represented a major opportunity to reduce friction and improve customer experience, given that roughly 75% of Sakara’s traffic came from browsers on iOS mobile devices.
Sakara needed an intuitive iPhone app that would do justice to their premium brand and make managing meal subscriptions a breeze. Fueled was tasked to design and deliver a flagship mobile experience that would delight Sakara’s loyal customers and drive retention and growth.
The Solution: A Seamless Wellness Management App
Our approach began with user research and a deep dive into Sakara’s existing web analytics. We identified pain points and opportunities: customers wanted a central hub to manage their meal plans, quick access to nutritional info, easier checkout for one-off items, and reminders so they’d never miss a customization window.
Our proposed solution centered on an elegant calendar-based UX paired with robust native integrations. Each delivery week is presented clearly; to change the week, customers simply scroll the calendar bar at the top. A tap on any day reveals a detailed menu for each scheduled meal, including vibrant photos, ingredient lists, and icons for dietary tags (gluten-free, contains nuts, etc.). If a customer isn’t thrilled about a particular meal, they can swap it out with a tap. The app shows a “Swapped” label for meals that have been changed, and it enforces Sakara’s deadlines so changes are only allowed before the weekly lock date. This calendar-centric design ensures customers have full control over their nutrition schedule and never lose track of what’s coming next.
We also added push notification reminders before each week’s cut-off time; a solution aimed squarely at the top complaint revealed by customer research.
More than Meals: Speedy Micro Transactions
Sakara isn’t just about meal programs; they also offer wellness products such as nutritional powders, snacks, and supplements. To drive upsells and make on-the-go purchasing easy, Fueled integrated Sakara’s Shopify storefront directly into the app.
By visiting a “Shop” section in the app’s navigation, customers can browse the full catalog of Sakara’s products, organized by category (Bars & Snacks, Teas, Supplements, etc.). Fueled engineers leveraged Shopify’s native SDK to ensure the product listings, inventory, and cart stay in sync with Sakara’s online store. Since this was an iOS-only app, we took advantage of Apple Pay integration, encouraging shoppers to purchase products without having to look for their wallets. Post-launch data showed mobile conversion rates improved by about 20% compared to the previous web experience.
Bringing the Sakara Lifestyle to Mobile
On the visual side, Sakara’s brand ethos – clean, vibrant, and free-spirited – comes through in the app’s design. We used Sakara’s existing brand guidelines (elegant fonts, a minimalist black-and-white base with pops of color from food photography) as a starting point, then refined the UI to be more consistent and intuitive for mobile use. The result is a modern, airy interface that lets the beautiful imagery of the meals shine while still feeling snappy and utilitarian.
The app is built in SwiftUI, Apple’s framework for crafting user interfaces. SwiftUI enabled us to build a slick, responsive UI faster and with fewer bugs, so we could iterate quickly on features and polish the design. The choice of native iOS (rather than a cross-platform solution) was deliberate: with an exclusively iPhone user base at launch, we wanted to harness all the native capabilities like Apple Pay, smooth animations, and push notifications to deliver a truly best-in-class experience.
Robust Internal and External Integrations
Under the hood, Sakara’s meal subscriptions run on a custom backend system that our app engineers integrated using that system’s APIs. This powers all the calendar data: what meals are scheduled, which can be swapped, and the selection deadlines.
For the loyalty component, we brought in Yotpo, Sakara’s rewards program provider. Sakara members can see and redeem their reward points in-app, encouraging them to engage more with the ecosystem. And for customer support, we embedded Zendesk so customers can quickly get help or send a message to Sakara’s support team right from the app.
Throughout development, Fueled worked as an extension of Sakara’s team. We collaborated in sprints, constantly aligning with Sakara’s stakeholders to fine-tune the experience. By choosing scalable tools and modular architecture, we set the app up for long-term success. It’s an app built not just for launch, but to grow and evolve alongside Sakara’s business.
Launching and Looking Ahead
After rigorous QA and user testing, we invited a group of ~400 loyal Sakara members to try the app first. This beta period allowed us to gather feedback and ensure the experience was fully meeting customer needs and expectations. The response was overwhelmingly positive: during the beta test, we observed an average of 266 daily sessions, with spikes to 350+ on Sundays when customers received their weekly reminders to check the menu.
In May 2021, we officially launched the app to all Sakara customers, and the Day 1 metrics blew past expectations: 4,957 user sessions in the first day, with over 2,500 meals viewed in the calendar and 667 meal swaps completed. Four months post-launch, Sakara reported that 75% of all subscription modifications were now made via the app (vs. the website).
The Sakara Life app garnered industry recognition, nominated for a “Best Mobile App of 2021” award shortly after launch. This nod affirmed that the app wasn’t just functionally successful, but also a well-crafted product in the eyes of the broader tech community.
From UX research and design, through cutting-edge development and systems integration, Fueled crafted a product experience that bridges the digital and physical – making healthy living simpler for thousands of Sakara customers.
