Giant Eagle
SmartEats
A service-design case study redesigning the grocery experience around AI-assisted meal recommendations and ingredient delivery — turning the rewards data Giant Eagle already collects into a habit-changing meal planner.
Summary
Role
UX & Service Designer with 3 other designers
Timeline
January — May 2024
Responsibility
I conducted research, ideated, created flows, and designed screens for the final product.
Problem
How might Giant Eagle compete with the big players in meal solutions?
Giant Eagle has a presence in the world of meal solutions (meal kits, prepared food, etc.), but wants to understand how they might compete with the big players in this space. How might we find success among our customers, and even potentially disrupt this industry?
Solution
The final flow — from personalization to delivery to the savings dashboard.
AI-assisted ingredient detection
Save personalized, suggested meal plans for the week
Figure out what ingredients you're missing for the meal
Easy in-app grocery delivery to complete meals
Find out how much time, money, & food waste you've saved
Notifications to reinforce benefits
Context
Open-ended, with a few starting threads.
Giant Eagle is looking for ways to improve their revenue in this area. Their problem was very open-ended, but they did identify some potential considerations / areas of improvement for us to get started:
Increasing online grocery purchases
Opportunity to grow curbside pickup and delivery
Increase smaller basket sizes and purchases
Connecting the in-person and online shopping experience to grow the app user base
Research
Where shoppers actually struggle.
To build a foundation and uncover areas of improvement, we conducted experiential research, guerilla research, competitive analysis, and interviews with 8 shoppers at both Giant Eagle and competing grocery stores — surfacing shopping habits, blockers, and pain points.
Ingredient-to-recipe gap
There's a missed opportunity to guide users from "what do I need?" to "what can I make?" by suggesting recipes during grocery-list creation — particularly when meal ideas are unclear.
How might we…
Through our research, we reframed our problem statement:
How might we help shoppers figure out what to cook and get what they need — without another trip to the store?
What does SmartEats do?
Turn the data Giant Eagle already collects into a meal planner.
Giant Eagle obtains valuable data through their rewards program, myPerks. They know what a shopper has bought in a grocery trip.
They can suggest personalized meal recipes in the app based on shoppers' purchases, recommending missing ingredients for delivery to complete the meal.
Where does SmartEats come into play?
Two service blueprints — current state vs. SmartEats.
Taking a broader look, we mapped out how and where SmartEats would come into play and how it would affect the process of purchasing ingredients for delivery.
Service Blueprint: Current Giant Eagle
Preparation
Purchasing
Delivery
Shopper action
Shopper picks weekly meals
Shopper checks pantry manually
Shopper searches and adds ingredients
Shopper adds extras for delivery minimum
Shopper receives order
Product + operations
Recipe browse + list creation
Ingredient search and cart updates
Checkout and purchase confirmation
Inventory, fulfillment, and packing
Delivery + doorstep confirmation
The current process for ordering grocery delivery is quite tedious and complicated, with many manual steps and decision points.
What's in it for everyone?
A win on both sides of the counter.
What's in it for shoppers?
Save time and effort.Save a trip to the store and get missing ingredients delivered while you prep the rest.
Reduce decision fatigue.Providing solutions at the point of indecisiveness and hunger alleviates emotional distress.
Prevent food waste.Notify shoppers what they could cook with previous purchases before they go bad.
Save money.Remind and encourage shoppers that cooking costs less than eating out.
Improvements
Refining the design after shopper feedback.
After figuring out what to design, we refined the designs based on shopper feedback.
Adding shoppers' taste preferences
Recommended recipes are useful based off of shopping history, but shoppers thought it could be improved by tailoring it to users' tastes and preferences as well.
Scheduled delivery
Our design before only allowed for purchase for immediate delivery. We learned that as shoppers planned their meals out for the week, they also wanted to schedule deliveries so they could forget about it and have ingredients delivered right before cooking for optimal freshness.
Savings and waste reminder
A notification recommending a specific recipe might not be enough for people to choose to cook, but showing food waste and specific money saved helps overcome that motivation barrier.
Metrics
If we had access to / enough time to work with the Giant Eagle team to implement this feature, I would have loved to see:
Daily / weekly SmartEats users
Tracks adoption and repeat behavior over time.
Item delivery revenue
Measures direct business impact from SmartEats-assisted orders.
Increase in item purchases
Shows whether SmartEats drives larger or more complete baskets.
Recipe completion rates
Indicates if suggested meals are actually being followed through.
Reflections & learnings
The dual stakeholder constraint shapes every decision.
In service design, every feature had to work for both the shopper and Giant Eagle's business model. That's a different kind of constraint than a typical product design project.
Designing for behavior change is different from designing for tasks.
SmartEats isn't just helping people complete a task — it's trying to change a habit. That's a harder design problem, and its success would have to be measured long term.