The Fresh Market
The Fresh Market UX/UI
2025
Services
UX Design
The Fresh Market a premium grocery brand traditionally favored by an older demographic faced a pivotal moment during the COVID19 pandemic. Like many retailers the brand relied heavily on Instacart for its digital presence. However as their core customer base continued to age it became clear that attracting a younger mobile native audience would be essential to sustaining instore foot traffic and long term growth. Our challenge was to create a proposal that reimagine the digital experience for this emerging audience. Timeline for this project was 5 weeks.
The Goal
A proposal envisioning a mobile grocery app that appeals to younger users while preserving The Fresh Market’s core values of impeccable hospitality and personalized service into a refined, intuitive digital experience that broadens appeal and strengthens brand loyalty.
Overview of the process
1. Background Information
2. Pain points
3. The Grocery Landscape
4. Main Take Away
5. Story Arcs
6. Baymard Guide
7. Sketches & Wires
8. Inspiration
9. Style guide
10. Mobile Designs
1.0 Discovery Phase
Background Information
The Fresh Market is a luxury grocery brand dedicated to providing guests with the finest in-store experience possible. Guided by its motto of impeccable hospitality, the brand is known for curating only the best in each food category. They pride themselves on sourcing top-tier products, making every visit an elevated culinary experience
Pain Points & Assumptions
Stakeholder interviews revealed
1) Difficulty curating an accurate digital representative of their hospitality and values while on Instacart.
2) The struggle with creating social content to capture younger audience.
3) The instore hospitality is clear but guests aren't always aware of how personalized the service is. For example the butcher will cut meat to a customers preference if asked.
4) Not a lot of people knew about the instacart app.
5) They brand looks expensive but prices are actually comparable to a Publix.
The Grocery Landscape
The first step involved conducting light competitive research across grocery and food service brands to uncover key insight. We focused on:
1) How products were marketed to people
2) How brands created seamless connections across different touchpoints, for example guiding users from a social media post to an online purchase
3) Strategies used to drive in-store foot traffic
4) Any unique or noteworthy tactics employed
The analysis spanned a range of brands in the food industry.
Main Take Away
A number of grocery stores used instacart, so collectively most did not have control over the digital experience that represented to their customers.
Groceries stores in general were not doing anything really innovative as a whole, but a few had things of note.
Carulla: Scan a product with your phone, pay in the app and walk out showing the digital receipt.
Longos: Had in store cooking lessons for parents, kids and couples as away to increase foot traffic into the store.
Trader Joes: loyal fanbase creates shareable content for their brand, increasing their foot traffic though they have no digital app. Community podcasts share stories of the people behind the brand. The podcast style can feel like being at “dinner with the family”
The Story Arcs
With only 5 weeks we had to figure out a way to work efficiently, while still being able to tell a compelling story that took our clients through the various ways the mobile app could function, with screens that supported the story.
To do this we spent time crafting 3 stories with the digital experience at the center, and chose points along each story to create mobile designs for.
*underline means a point of interest to possibly visualize
2.0 Design Process & Iteration
Baymard Premuim
Gave us quick insights to tried and true mobile patterns that we could build upon and take not of as we made design decisions.
Sketches and Wires
Quick sketches lowfidelity wireframes and greybox screens helped the entire team understand what should be highlighted on each screen
Inspiration
Taking inspiration from what we had seen while researching other competitors in the food industry helped us get to a look and feel.
Style Guide Iteration
The clients did not have much of a style guide but throughout their photography and in store graphics was a consistent style that we could leverage and expand to create the basic digital components we would need.
Mobile Screens
The collective efforts of the entire team helped us get to a tailored version 1 of the mobile app that the clients loved and were excited about.
Final Screens
Outcome
The approach was positively received by the client.
- Technical discussion were scheduled to figure out a path to getting the app to an MVP state.
- Usability testing will be required to further validate design decisions.
The sun is shinning over here and it's gonna be a goodyear…