Meat, portioned for one

Context

JuicyBite started as a chicken breast brand. By the end of the summer it had four product lines and 13 products, adding pork, duck and spicy mala to the chicken. The direct-to-consumer website still looked like a single-product chicken store.

The problem

Thirteen products, some of them raw, on a site built for one fully cooked one. That’s not only a design problem. If a customer believes something is ready to eat when it isn’t, the result is a one-star review at best, and a food safety problem at worst.

What I did

A position

I rebuilt the brand around one line: “Meat, portioned for one.” Single servings, individually sealed, nothing wasted.

Three ways to cook

I sorted every product into one of three cooking groups and built that into the whole site:

• Fully cooked, one minute in the microwave.
• Fully cooked, three minutes in a pan.
• Raw, eight minutes in a pan.

The smoked duck needed its own warning: it’s fully cooked, but it shouldn’t go in the microwave.

Keeping what we had earned

I kept the existing store rather than starting a new one. It had 133 reviews averaging five stars, an order history, and its place in search results. Starting over would have thrown all of that away.

Building it

I built the store’s theme myself, about twenty files, and checked it four separate ways before calling it done. I also prepared product data for all thirteen products, with three variants each.

Auditing what was already there

Before adding anything, I audited the live site and found eight problems that predated me. Every product shared the chicken breast’s ingredient text. An age check meant for alcohol was switched on. The social links pointed to Shopify’s own accounts instead of ours. And some product claims didn’t match what I could verify from the ingredient list. I flagged those before we put new products next to them.

The new site was ready to go live once the nutrition information was confirmed with the plants and the new products were photographed.

What I learned

How you classify products is risk management, not interface design. The cooking groups look like a detail. They’re the thing that keeps a raw product from being treated as a ready one.

Trust you’ve already earned, like reviews and search ranking, is worth more than a clean start.

And it’s worth auditing before you build. A lot of what needed fixing wasn’t new at all.