On 28th December 2023, Mindful Chef, the UK’s highest rated recipe box, experienced its first significant website crash due to customer demand as thousands of new and existing customers flocked to get their healthy start to the year locked in ahead of New Year’s Eve celebrations. The service, which offers a wide range of nutritionally balanced recipes as well as a convenient Ready to Go range, all of which are gluten and refined sugar free, saw a 2069% increase in new customer sign-ups, triggering the business to increase its capacity across its warehouse operations and call in its digital teams to cope with the surge in demand.
Adding to this, on the 2nd January 2024, Mindful Chef experienced its biggest day for new customer sign-ups since COVID pandemic, achieving a 70% increase YoY. The business reports strong growth across all customer segments with winback also being significantly up by 25% YoY.
Founded in 2015 by three Devon school friends Giles, Myles and Rob, the brand’s mission is to make healthy eating easy through its range of options to suit all occasions; Mindful Chef customers can order directly from mindfulchef.com for free nationwide delivery, building personalised healthy meal plans for the week. With options for all lifestyles, Mindful Chef offers one-person, two-person and family recipe boxes, and also caters for vegan, vegetarian, flexitarian and pescatarian diets. All of Mindful Chef’s innovative meals are nutritionally balanced.
Each week there are 40 new recipes to choose from, celebrating flavours from all over the world, and bringing a unique variety to its customers. Each recipe uses sustainably sourced ingredients of the highest quality, including only LEAF-accredited fruit and vegetables and 100% British meat, free-range chicken and pork, grass-fed beef and sustainably caught fish.
Giles Humphries, co-founder of Mindful Chef, comments: “Seeing the website crash just ahead of the New Year was a clear indication to us that health and wellbeing remains at the front of many people’s minds. We were delighted to see such a significant spike in new customer sign-ups this post-New Year, with a +2069% uplift. This has beaten the +452% increase that we experienced at the peak of the Covid lockdown.
We believe that due to the cost of living challenges more consumers are opting to eat in and trade up to quality meals at home, which is why we continue to partner with the likes of with Deliciously Ella, Leon, Wahaca, Nandos, Hawksmoor, Giggling Squid and Rukmini Iyer. It’s important to us that we provide healthy, nutritious and exciting meals to our customers throughout the year.
As a business with health and wellbeing at its heart, the New Year is typically a busy period for Mindful Chef, however, with increased pressure on customer spending, this recent hike is higher than expected.”
