A company that started selling recipe boxes from a London market in 2012 is now using IoT technology to handle the huge surge in countrywide deliveries, delegates to last week’s IoT Tech Expo were told.

The company is Gousto and each box contains all the ingredients needed for a particular recipe along with instructions. It is tapping into a market that sees three-quarters of all evening meals consumed in the UK being cooked at home, a figure that grew during the recent pandemic lockdowns.

“In 2020, the landscape changed and fuelled an online market, setting us on an accelerated growth journey,” said Jon David Carman, the firm’s group product manager, at the London event. “That growth has continued; we are selling three meals a second.”

In 2019, the firm opened its first fulfilment centre in Lincoln. By the end of 2022, the goal is to have four around the country.

“We are having to scale quite rapidly,” said Carman. “This has led to us using simulation capabilities to model our supply chain.”

The first challenge was forecasting orders and deciding which centre to fulfil these orders; there are now two centres. Adding to the complexity are menus that change each week.

“At first, we had unacceptable levels of forecast errors,” said Carman. “This meant we were over-ordering and increasing food waste.”

One of the company’s promotional claims is that its boxes reduce food waste because each meal has exactly the right amount of ingredients. Having an ordering and delivery system that produces more food waste went against that.

The company is now processing live data and planning according to food and courier availability using digital twin technology.

“The next iteration will be predicting the future,” said Carman. “There isn’t a crystal ball out there. We could guess, or we can model and simulate our entire supply chain. So we have linked all our data points into a digital twin.”

This mirror copy lets the company ask questions and get answers, such as to how much labour it will need on a particular day if there are a certain number of menu items. Should all recipes be available from all sites? And so on.

“We haven’t got the luxury of waiting,” said Carman. “We need to test and iterate as we go along. Don’t be afraid to leverage simulation. We are not going to be 100 per cent right in forecasting, but we will be less wrong. Digital twins do not need to be complex. We have a basic set up and it really helps.”