Does Meatless Farm Deliver a Positive Customer Experience?

We took a close look at the vegan food brand’s CRM marketing strategy. Check how they score against other brands we graded so far!

Adebisi Adewusi

January 13, 2022

Meatless Farm is a British company that produces vegan, plant-based alternatives. Making going meat-free easy and delicious!

Let’s see how well the vegan food brand treats its customers according to our 7 Commandments of Basic CRM – and how it compares to the +60 brands we’ve examined so far.

1. Be Transparent 3/10

Most articles we saw online were about product releases, like this one announcing Meatless Farm’s new product Soya Free Plant-Based Chicken Breasts. We didn’t see any news about the brand’s internal operations like plans for the future, financial reports, or the faces behind the brand. So we knock off a few good points for that.

Being transparent is key to building brand trust and long-term customer loyalty. Meatless Farm can improve its transparency score by showing the people behind its brand and talking about its internal operations, or sharing decision-making motives with customers. This will make customers feel like a part of the company’s mission and goal, and improve customer engagement.

2. Incentives and Perks 0/10

When it comes to giving discounts or different sorts, Meatless Farm doesn’t seem very generous. As at the time we wrote this article, we didn’t see any sales page or free shipping offers. While browsing the product section, we weren’t given any discounts or offers. Not even some basic sign-up discounts.

Incentives and perks are a great way to hook customers, get them to buy again, and for the brand to build more meaningful relationships with customers. Generally, Meatless Farm doesn’t offer a lot of incentives and perks. We’d have loved to see more incentives like referral bonuses and discounts for making a first-time purchase or signing up to the brand’s newsletter.

3. Be Relevant 8/10

As customers demand more environmentally friendly everything, Meatless Farm stays relevant by offering new plant-based and animal-free foods.

We found a cool ‘change the world’ calculator that allows customers to swap their usual meaty ingredient for something meatless and see what environmental impact it makes. Pure genius!

Meatless Farm has a useful recipes section at the top of its website where customers can find meatless meals.

We would have given a perfect 10 here had the site included a little more content, connecting the brand’s activity to events relevant to its visitors’ lives and preferences.

4. Be Helpful 10/10

Today’s customers expect charitable initiatives from the brands they choose to support. For this commandment, we check to see whether the brand has been giving back. Meatless Farm partnered with plant-based chef Omari McQueen for its For Kids By Kids campaign. The campaign is aimed at including more plant-based food on school menus.

Meatless Farm also partners with ReThink Food to donate plant-based food to schools and teach children about the importance of sustainable eating. We like how Meatless Farm supports its community and promotes it on its website.

5. Realtime Personalization 3/10

Logging to Meatless Farm’s site, we were able to choose our location. To test Meatless Farm’s location personalization capabilities we selected Canada as our location. To our surprise, the website content reflected our location selection. For instance, the homepage content, product selection, and offers were different.

While we spent some time browsing the meatless section, the website didn’t change to reflect our online behaviour and we weren’t offered product recommendations. When we left the website we weren’t retargeted with ads on social media or online.

Sadly, Meatless Farm gave us a generic shopping experience. The brand misses many opportunities to deliver realtime personalization. For instance, by simply using our browsing data, they could have recommended relevant products to us and improved our shopping experience.

With customers more likely to shop with brands that offer a spectacularly personalized shopping experience, realtime personalization is a “must-have” if Meatless Farm is looking to build customer loyalty.

6. Master UX 5/10

Meatless Farm has a clean website that is easy to use and navigate. The brand’s Homepage & Category navigation experience is decent. We explored the site’s categories and range of products without feeling overloaded.

Meatless Farm’s product browsing experience isn’t great as we couldn’t narrow down products by specific filters and the products didn’t have reviews or ratings. The absence of product reviews and ratings made it difficult for us to determine which product we viewed suited our needs. But we found a detailed FAQ page that answered a lot of relevant questions.

In all, Meatless Farm’s website UX performance is below average compared to other sites we’ve analyzed. Putting a review section and product filters will improve Meatless Farm user experience.

7. Leverage Social Media 5/10

Meatless Farm has a presence on social media with almost 140k followers on Instagram and nearly 120k likes on Facebook, along with a little under 6k followers on Twitter.

Meatless Farm’s posts on Facebook are mostly promotional. We think Meatless Farm can use Facebook to drive more engagement by hosting live cooking sessions, fun polls, more educational content, and more.

Meatless Farm’s Instagram post is promotional and educational. However, the content is mostly similar to what we found on Facebook.

For Twitter, Meatless Farm frequently updates its page. However, the content is similar to what we found on Facebook and Instagram.

Meatless Farm can do more to leverage Instagram to connect with its audience. We recommend that Meatless Farm posts user-generated content to help drive engagement and build its social media community.

In all, Meatless Farm does a decent job of being active on social media. But the vegan brand does a lot of cross-posting, and leaves plenty of engagement potential untapped. We suggest that Meatless Farm has a different strategy for each social media page. This will help the brand deliver tailored and relevant content to its different audiences, taking advantage of the different platforms’ capabilities and audience tendencies/expectations. Social media is a great tool to strengthen customer relationships.

Verdict Time!

So, does Meatless Farm deliver a positive customer experience? From our view, Meatless Farm’s basic CRM strategy isn’t up to some other brands’ standards. Falling short on incentives and perks and user experience the brand scores, 34/70 – enough for only 48% points, tied for last among the 63 brands examined so far.

Among other things, including stepping up its social media game, we recommend that Meatless Farm adopts realtime personalization by leveraging customer data to perform customer segmentation. This will improve its ability to offer next-best-action recommendations and relevant customer communication.

Find out more about personalization here.

We hope Meatless Farm listens to our advice and takes steps to improve its CRM practices and deliver great shopping experiences to its customers.

Here’s the full rankings so far: