The Pioneer interview with... Tim Lee, Mindful Chef CEO

Since joining the recipe box pioneers, Mindful Chef, Tim Lee has helped thousands of customers to eat easily, enjoyably and healthily. They are the only one of the recipe box players to have a truly branded customer proposition, and they have been pioneering in this digitally-led, meal-kit category to also provide health benefits that are appreciated and that earn long-term relationships too. They are now owned by Nestle as part of their portfolio of innovative new businesses.

During the early years of the business, they established their differentiated take on the offer. Then when Covid hit and demand skyrocketed, smart planning that had prioritised flexibility and customer-led thinking meant they could keep welcoming and serving every new customer.

Tim has had a long career in the food industry - from fish factories in Newcastle to Covent Garden and Spitalfield markets before long spells at Tesco and Marks & Spencer’s Food business,  where he led their strategy as they continued their impressive growth well beyond a niche.

Throughout his career, Tim has pioneered for customers in the UK and internationally. In this interview we look at how he has taken his in-depth knowledge of the food industry from the nation’s largest grocer and used it to help this ethical BCorp start-up become a pioneering part of a global multinational.

Q. The move from big multinational organisations to Mindful Chef, a small digital start-up, must have been a big shift. How did you steer through it and how did the focus on the customer compare?

My career had already started to migrate away from bricks and mortar into digital. So even when I was in the US with Tesco, starting up Fresh & Easy, I was helping to build their first digital loyalty card. And at M&S, I was running food online and exploring where next in terms of digital.

I got to know a lot of digital businesses at that stage, including Deliveroo in the early days before it expanded. I was doing a lot of work learning how digital works and how customers were migrating more towards an omnichannel experience.

Mindful Chef combined a pure digital approach with a focus on health which I felt was going to be a really big thing for customers. For me, it struck three chords – being focused on health, which is a big challenge, being a pioneer in digital, which is where customers were moving to, and being a values-based business.

Even when I started back in 2018, the three founders were already well advanced on becoming the first ever recipe box B-Corp, doing things like 1 feeds 2, so for every box sold, one meal is given to a child living in poverty.

As to the customer focus, it all comes down to leadership, whatever the size of organisation. If you’ve got the right leadership and focus, it doesn't matter if you're a small or large business. You need to be passionate about customers, and passionate about solving their problems. Are you constantly asking how your customers are? Are we looking after them? What are we doing for them? Do we think this is a great experience? How can we improve it?

Do you really want to be seen by customers as the best business? Are you assessing yourself against the metrics that matter or are you just looking at gross sales or the metrics of the business…because if so, the likelihood is that you're never going to be customer-focused.

I think we think we're pretty customer-focused. But even now, when we're close to it and have lots of information, we still have blind spots. It's inevitable.

Q. Mindful Chef is now part-owned by Nestlé. How has this changed the company’s focus and how have you kept the customer-pioneering spirit alive?

We've got a professional investor in Nestlé. They've allowed us to continue to be independent. We run the business. We're connected but not integrated, this meant we've been able to stay close to our customers.

One of the many benefits of being a digital business is that you get to know your customers very well – who they are, where they're from, how much they spend, how frequently they spend and so on.

We overlay this data with an annual survey and focus groups. In the first week that I joined, we had a focus group with our customers to learn what they thought and felt about us as a whole. We’re still doing it and this keeps us in touch.

We've developed what we call our customer promises. We call them Moments that Matter and they’re central to how we run the business. For example, within our Moments that Matter one metric is NPS. Our view is that if we get our five promises right – Easy to use, I can get what I order; The quality is incredible; The recipes are healthy and delicious; and I feel looked after – our NPS tends to go up. Not only that, but the business tends to improve sales, retention is better and so on.

We start each week with these Moments that Matter and their associated metrics. All our teams report their performance against them. It's very clear, and everyone knows what's important for our customers. They know what their job is, and they're empowered to solve the problems that arise.

It really helps bring customers right to the forefront. Nestlé has really enjoyed learning about it all too, because it isn’t something they do in their businesses.

We can be a force for good within a big organisation, and I feel like we’re better set up to make a difference by being proactive in a larger organisation because we can unlock benefits by using their strengths – their capital, their ability, their knowledge, their expanded capability, their reach beyond the UK.

Q. Do you think being a digitally-based organisation gives you an advantage over physical businesses in terms of being close to customers, or vice versa?

That’s a great question. Retailers like Tesco and M&S know their customers very well.  Nothing beats walking the stores, being with customers, talking to the teams on the shop floor, hearing their experiences about what's working for customers and what's not, being approached by customers in the aisles… You've got an instant barometer and sense-check on the business. This is a big strength.

The advantage of a pure digital organisation is that you have so much more information. You are aware of all the different touchpoints that your customers experience and you understand the customer journey better than in the physical world, partly because you see what they’re doing from the point they arrive, and, if you've got good analytics, you can act on it to get better and grow sales.

You know where they've come from, so you can be clear on your channel acquisition strategy. You know your attribution models. You can see where you are winning customers, and you can equally see where and why you're losing customers.

The data has a great richness in it, but it’s not like touching customers directly. Without meeting them face-to-face, you don't get the nuances of what really matters to them, and you don't necessarily sense the passion you feel if you're on a shop floor.

So, I think you need both. You need the digital to give you the power, and with the tools we have now with AI etc, there’s an incredible amount that you can churn out in terms of what customers are doing, why they're doing it and more. But you also need that nuance – the feeling and the emotion. Then you really understand.

In the early days we used to rely heavily on digital data and less on interviews. We did one customer interview session pretty soon after I arrived. We were telling them about how purpose-driven we were and the good stuff we do, but the customers didn’t know about any of this. The team was really surprised. Then the customers said well, we're not always on Facebook and Instagram, which is where most of your communication is.

That was one of our aha! moments. Customers wanted to learn about the businesses through physical things, not just online. So, rather than a recipe card, we decided to do a recipe booklet where we could showcase and explain, not just how delicious and healthy the recipes are, but the other things we do as a business.

Customers now tell us they sit and read the book, or it sits on their kitchen table. This was a huge opportunity, but we would never have discovered it through our digital insight. It just doesn’t bring these nuances to life.

Q. You’ve shown the power that surveying customers can have, but you can’t survey everyone. How do you decide who to survey?

We were told that you can’t do long surveys. Customers won’t have the attention, blah, blah, blah. Our survey takes around 10 minutes to complete, which is quite long, and we get a huge response rate, over 20%. We use this as a barometer of customer behaviour - what they’re doing and why.

For the more nuanced work, rather than focusing on all customers, we focus on our top customers. If you can understand who your best customers are and their motivations, and if you’re doing a great job for them, then the likelihood is you’ll be able to pull more customers up through the funnel to become best customers too.

We use tech to do this. All through the journey we signpost top customers. So even if they're new and they have this potential, we put a signpost on to say, ‘Ah, Justine's joined. She comes from a good postcode, she’s spent a lot of money’. That's a good indicator of whether she's likely to become a top customer. This is early prediction modelling, which is important in enabling the business to grow in a focused way, and allowing your resources to be well targeted.

Q. What does it mean to be a customer pioneer? Where did your desire come from?

I think deep down it comes from your values, wanting to help people. In a business sense, it's about solving their problems. For us, it's pretty emotional. We had a lady in one interview who told us about a recent traumatic experience. Her husband had an accident. He always used to cook so she hadn’t needed to. Then suddenly she had to cook for him and didn’t know how. We helped her by solving a massive problem.

I suppose you look for the drivers in terms of making people feel better. It’s our mission to make healthy eating easy. If you can find a mission, a way of genuinely creating value, then it's motivating.

So, for me it's about having a value-set focused around people and applying it to a business by saying, OK, well, how do you solve these problems? Then you've got something that's worth getting up in the morning for. It's not magic, but if you get things right for customers, funny enough, they come back to you and they spend more money with you.

It’s about really understanding your customers, working hard to find solutions which are not always obvious. You need to be super-objective, getting away from subjectivity so you’re sure you’re solving the right problems. The rest falls into place If you get it right.

Q. It all sounds very logical and obvious, so why do some companies find it so hard to be customer-led or to act in this way?

I think some people just aren't interested in being close to customers. They’re more interested in the organisation and building businesses. A lot forget they're out there to look after their customers and they forget they're trying to solve their problems. It's easy to get caught up in delivering for shareholders or for the board, and it’s easy to lose direction. This is totally understandable when you're under pressure performance-wise. Equally, if you're doing really well, I can see how you can come off the boil and forget to push and question.

Tesco was a great example of that. It was a fantastic leader, pioneering for customers with Clubcard and Tesco.com which started way back in the early days of the internet. They were real pioneers. Then as the business continued to grow and scale, it became less customer focused with leadership further away and with many other priorities. This was compounded by the change in leadership and the internal challenges the business faced

The reverse is also true. Stuart Machin at M&S is having a super positive effect, bringing the business back to thinking about what's important for customers.

You can lose it and then regain it.

It comes down to leadership – from the focus, through to the language and the priorities. If, as a leader, you’re not focused on customers, then your teams will never be.

Q. Who else do you admire in terms of being customer-led and putting their customers at the forefront?

There are a couple of examples. I wouldn't say I love but I do admire Amazon Prime and what Jeff Bezos has done. Focusing on making purchasing digitally simple and solving the problem of quick delivery. This is very smart customer-focused decision-making. You only have to look at people's purchasing habits, Amazon Prime is still way up there in terms of being a leader for customers and millions of us use it because it is such a problem-solver.

What I do love, though, is what Brian Chesky did at Airbnb and the story around how you create a 5-star experience. People forget, it was a really basic business which wasn't doing very well. And then they turned it around by saying, well, how would we make it amazing? Rockstars opening your taxi door, that kind of thing. That's being really pioneering. Thinking outside the box, being creative, thinking about what is really important for customers when they want to go away. That's why they're so successful – they rooted their offer in their customers’ ideal experience.

These are two quite different examples. One quite functional and one imaginative and they’re both in the DNA of how we all shop today.