Pioneering food and healthy living brand Deliciously Ella has teamed up with eCommerce fulfilment provider Huboo to meet the growing pan-European demand for its plant-based food and cookery products.
Europe’s #1 plant-based recipe platform, Deliciously Ella is on a mission to help people eat real food again, with more plants, more of the time.. The brand has seen huge eCommerce growth since it first began selling online during the pandemic. With website orders from mainland Europe increasing, it needed a pan-European partner that could manage the complexities of exporting into the EU and alleviate the growing burden on its in-house team.
Working out of its Netherlands warehouse, Huboo has taken on fulfilment of all EU orders placed via Deliciously Ella’s website. Since the partnership began 12 months ago, the company’s European orders have increased by 99%, including a significant uplift in repeat custom, thanks to Huboo’s ability to track stock more efficiently and improve in-stock rates.
Rachel Whichelow, senior logistics manager at Delicious Ella comments: “At Deliciously Ella we pride ourselves not just on product, but on service quality, and we never want to risk disappointing a customer with an out-of-stock item or a delay to their order. Huboo runs our pan-European D2C fulfilment operation like clockwork, handling all inbound orders and freeing up our team to focus on reaching new audiences and boosting sales. It’s the perfect partnership for a business like ours with genuine overseas growth ambitions.”
Deliciously Ella founder Ella Mills started sharing plant-based recipes in 2012 as a personal project, aiming to improve her health after being diagnosed with a chronic illness. Within three years she had published the UK’s fastest-selling debut cookbook ever and started the Deliciously Ella food products line with her partner Matthew Mills. They have now sold almost 100million food products since launch in 2016.
Since day one, the brand has directly engaged with its community via social media, with over four million people following their social channels. Today it offers a range of over 100 natural, plant-based food products – from delicious snacks to breakfast cereals and healthy meal staples – alongside cookery books and merchandise. Around 75% of their eCommerce orders come via its website, making prompt and efficient fulfilment a necessity, particularly for consumables, which require tight batch control and inventory management.
Rachel Whichelow, senior logistics manager at Delicious Ella comments: “We needed a true partner to support our EU fulfilment and Huboo impressed us from day one with their tech, personalisation capabilities and, ultimately, their desire to work closely as an extension of our team. Working together, we’ve been able to improve all aspects of ongoing fulfilment – from stock management to customer response times. With Huboo at our side, we always feel in control of our D2C operation, giving us confidence when planning for future growth.”
Based in Bristol, Huboo provides multi-channel fulfilment and storage services for more than 1,400 businesses across the UK, Europe and the US. It is the pioneer of the ‘hub-based’ warehousing model – a unique human-centric system focused on ‘hubs’ – essentially micro-warehouses – that are run by small teams who participate in all aspects of the fulfilment process to make it more streamlined and efficient.
Paul Dodd, co-founder and chief innovation officer at Huboo, comments: “Deliciously Ella is a British success story – a super-relevant and digitally-savvy lifestyle brand that now stands on the cusp of a massive European growth opportunity. Our role is to remove the fulfilment roadblocks that stand in the way of this ambition and help Ella and her team grab the opportunity with both hands.”
