I analyzed Chefd.com and HelloFresh.com for my Introduction to Web Publishing class.

1. Devin Albertson
Assignment #1
Introduction to Web Publishing
January 25, 2018
Chef’d Popularity and Traffic Analysis
Web Site Overview
General Company Information
Chef’d is a meal kit company. According to the About Chef’d link, the founder and CEO,
Kyle Ransford, came across a recipe in a magazine and wonder why can’t I just press a button
and have this meal shipped to my door. In April 2015, Chef’d launched from El Segundo,
shipping subscription-free to anywhere in the United States within two days
(https://la.eater.com/2015/6/5/8737565/fabio-viviani-ben-ford-chefd-home-cooked-meals).
Chef’d uses award-winning chefs to share recipes with their customers. Chef’d is big on
personalization and giving their customers plenty of options. Chef’d also emphasizes the fact that
they are a subscription-free meal kit provider. This opens the door for vegetarians, gluten-free,
vegans, family friendly, gourmet, quick and easy as well as lighter options. I went to the press
link to find stories written about Chef’d. I found articles from LA Eater, Yahoo, PETA, Vogue,
Fortune, Bloomberg, Huffington Post, BBC, Fox Business, CNN Money, People, Forbes, and
Glam. The PETA endorsement was huge for Chef’d because it helped bring in the vegan
audience. One article that drew my eye was from Yahoo Sports on September 14, 2016. It talked
about a partnership with a virtual culinary assistant app SideChef. Now SideChef is not listed as
a partner on the website now, but a recipe app collaborating up with a website like Chefd.com is
great for Chef’d.
The Blog section was interesting, because it showed customers different ways to plan a
meal and meals to try in the future. There are four separate sections in the blog section: cook &

2. eat, tips & trick, dining & entertainment and people & places. The Food Critics section was nice
to have because it was cool to see Chef’d give their customer a platform to try to become a food
critic. They allow for easy sign up and have links to grow your social network through multiple
outlooks shown below.
In the screenshot below, I circled the things that helped me learn more about Chef’d in
red and what legitimized the website to me in blue. I already went over everything circled in red
in the previous paragraphs. These links were super helpful in getting to know Chef’d and what is
their company direction. Now the blue circles legitimized the website for obvious reasons.
Forbes, Fortune, People and CNN are well-known and respected national news organizations. I
looked up Food & Wine and it is a magazine that specialized in food and wine secrets from
celebrity chefs. Food & Wine Magazine is literally the perfect national magazine for Chef’d to
be associated with.

3. Product and Content Analysis
The biggest and most important thing that Chef’d does is meal kits. After finding where
to go to find the meals plans, I did a lot of counting. I counted the total amount meals and how
many of those meals were for breakfast, lunch, dinner or dessert. I also looked at the price range
for each section,
Chef’d contains 810 separate meals. Of these 810 meals, 44 breakfast meals, 131 lunch
meals, 562 dinner meals and 73 dessert meals. The price range for each of these options vary:
Breakfast from $10-$38 (Quaker Overnight Oats with Strawberries to Oat and Strawberry
Banana Smoothie Bowls).
Lunch from $9-$48 (Fuji Apple Coleslaw for two to Seared Branzino for two).
Dinner from $10-$80 (Baked Sweet Potato Fries for two to Australian Prim Wagyu Filet
for two).
Dessert from $18-$189 (White Chip Lemon Bars to Celebration Cake with Vanilla
Buttercream).

4. You can also filter out meals by cooking time, proteins, cuisine, category, skill level,
dietary lifestyle, allergens and spice level as seen in the screen shot above. There are five
different cook times, nine different proteins, 17 different cuisines, five separate categories, four
different skill levels, five separate dietary lifestyles, eight different allergens and four different
spice levels.
Chef’d has 48 total partners, but they highlighted the biggest partners and newest partners
on their main navigation drop down page. As you can see in the screenshot below, Chef’d lists
their featured partner, the next five biggest partners as well as their three new partners with a link
below to find the remaining 40 partners. I love this because it shows some extra love for the most
important partners of the site.

5. Chef’d also displays chefs that share their recipes. Like the partners section, the chef
section has one featured chef, the four most popular chefs and the three newest chefs with a link
to the remaining 43 chefs. This is great because if a customer loves recipes from Virginia Wells,
it is easy to find.
Competing Site
HelloFresh.com is also a planned meal delivery company. Hello Fresh is not
subscription-free company like Chef’d, it is a soft subscription business. Hello Fresh’s founders
Dominik Richter and Thomas Griesel started the company because they believed everyone
deserved access to great ingredients and know how to cook great meals, not just experts and
enthusiasts. It looks like the subscription works in four simple steps: select you favorite dishes
from 15 chef-curated weekly recipes, schedule convenient deliveries, ingredients shipped straight
to your door and then cook the food. It also says the customer can skip a week anytime, making
it a soft subscription instead of a hard subscription. HelloFresh also offers deals to new
customers. This is a great way to bring in new customers. The deal is shown at the top of the
homepage as shown in the screenshot below.

6. Also, ever since we got this assignment I have either heard or seen things about
HelloFresh. I was listening to one of my favorite sports talk shows, The Herd with Colin
Cowherd, and the co-host Kristine Leahy mentioned how great Hello Fresh was. Then I was on
Facebook the day after looking at HelloFresh.com about saw the screenshot below. I am
guessing Facebook used my search history to bring up the ad, but that did not happen after
searching Chefd.com. It makes me think that HelloFresh is the bigger brand because I looked at
Chefd.com a lot more than I had looked at HellFresh.com, but I still saw HelloFresh advertising
before anything from Chef’d.

7. I looked through the press section of HelloFresh.com to try to find out for about the
company. It is based out of Berlin, Germany. It started in 2011 and grew rapidly between 2012
and 2015. The revenue grew from €2.3 million to €304 million in that short span. (Financial
Times). Other cool press materials I saw: “The 34 coolest tech CEOs in Europe: Dominik
Richter named,” “Ed Boyes, HelloFresh CEO US, ranked in Forbes 30 under 30,” and “Chrisitan
Gaertner, our CFO, gives an interview on CNBC.” These articles really helped put HelloFresh on
the international landscape of planned meal delivery.
HelloFresh also sells wine and kitchenware, which I think is awesome. People need
utensils to cook the food and who does not like wine with a fancy dinner? It just makes sense.
Well done by HelloFresh. Also, HelloFresh does a decent job at targeting college students, which
Chef’d does not do.

8. Popularity Analysis
Link Analysis
Total
Backlinks
No. of
Referring
Domains
Average
No. of
Backlinks/
Domain
Chefd.com
5,900 556 10.61
HelloFresh.com
31,800 2,800 11.36
Overview and Link Quantity Assessment
Popularity is different for websites than it is in a regular life setting. Popularity is the
number of sites that link to yours and the quality of those linked sites. Backlinks are links from
another website to your website. Chefd.com has 5,900 backlinks while HelloFresh.com has
whopping 31,800 backlinks. A referring domain is just a fancy name for a website. Chefd.com
has 556 referring domains and HelloFresh.com has 2,800 referring domains.
The biggest difference that I see is that Chef’d was late to the party that HelloFresh was
dominating. Chef’d started in 2015 and HelloFresh was already a multimillion dollar company in
2015 with brand recognition. Also as I stated earlier in the paper, HelloFresh is being mentioned
as national talk shows and showing up as suggested posts on Facebook. This should account for
the massive difference in backlinks and referring domains.
Another reason could be how they retain their customers. Chef’d is subscription-free so it
might be harder for them to get consistent business because people don’t feel obligated to keep
ordering to keep the subscription. HelloFresh’s soft-subscription allows them to have a steady
flow of business from repeat customers while giving their customers to opportunity to skip a
week (say your family was going to go on vacation and you would not need to use HelloFresh
for a week, you could skip that week and keep your subscription).

9. Analysis of Link Quality for Chef’d – Top 10 Referring Domain
1. atkins.com (671): This is a high-quality link because it is a brand name and it is a
partner of Chefd.com.
2. runnersworld.com (625): This is a high-quality link because it is a brand name and it is
a partner of Chefd.com just like atkins.com.
3. poststats.com (422): This is not a high-quality link because it is not a real website.
Also, SemRush.com had a Trust Score of zero. The Trust Score is labeled in the screenshot as
TS.
4. sidechef.com (413): This is a high-quality link because sidechef.com is a recipe site.
So a website that does recipes that links to a meal kit website is a great endorsement. As I found
out when looking in the press section earlier, SideChef teamed up with Chef’d to bring
chefd.com to the app world. So it totally makes sense why there are so many backlinks from
sidechef.com to Chefd.com.
5. wickedstuff.com (342): This is a high-quality link for the same reason that
sidechef.com, it is a recipe website that is linking to a meal kit website.

10. 6. yohoo.io (252): This is not a high-quality link because it is a couponing site. I had
never heard of it, but they have coupons for multiple big companies such as Walmart, Sears and
Target. I could not find any coupons for Chefd.com on the site, which docked it to a low quality
site. Also, SemRush.com had a Trust Score of zero.
7. vegetariantimes.com (241): This is a high-quality link because it is a partner like
atkins.com and runnersworld.com.
8. soyvay.com (103): This is a high-quality link because it is a partner, just like
atkins.com, runnersworld.com and vegetariantimes.com.
9. uriscan.io (99): This is not a high-quality link because it is just a domain that searches
for urls. It is also based out of Germany.
10. nytimes.com (94): This is high quality link for two reasons. Reason number one is it
is a partner to the site (New York Times Cooking). Reason number two is that it is a national
newspaper, which is great for the website.
Traffic Analysis
Visit Analysis
Chefd.com HelloFresh.com
Avg. Monthly Visits [SimilarWeb.com] 156,667 2,750,000
Avg. Monthly Visits [Quantcast.com] 56,833 614,000
Introduction and Definitions
A visit can be two different things. In Google Analytics, users are unique visitors. Unique
visitors are how many different devices used a certain website. A session is the number of times
total a website was visited during a certain timeframe, usually one month. I do not have access to
Chefd.com or HelloFresh.com’s Google Analytics, only the people at those websites have access
to that. So I used SimilarWeb.com and Quantcast.com to find the average monthly visits for each

11. website, as well as their bounce rate, page views per visit and average visit duration. The last
variables will be broken down in engagement analysis.
Chefd.com Traffic and Trends
The chart obviously shows a dramatic increase in visits between September and October.
In fact, the views doubled from 110,000 to 220,000 in that timespan. I looked into press stories
that occurred during that time that could have impacted Chef’d so drastically. On August 10th,
CNBC wrote an article about Chef’d received a $35.2 million in fundraising from three
companies: Smithfield Foods ($25 million), Campbell Soup ($10 million) and Fresh Direct
($200,000). This coincided with Blue Apron’s (another meal-kit company) stock market value
had plummeted nearly 40 percent. In addition to Blue Apron’s fall, the iPhone X was released in
October. This means thousands of people got new phones, which leads to more “new visitors.”
This also explains why the visits fell back down in November. People were using two different
devices to order from Chef’d in October, but only one in November and December.

12. I included this second screenshot from Quantcast.com because it displayed a longer
timeframe. Now the numbers are much lower on Quantcast.com than SimilarWeb.com, but this
chart shows a massive spike in traffic around February 2017 with noticeable dips in June 2016
and May 2017. I would speculate that the increase in February could coincide with Valentine’s
Day because of the dessert meal-kits Chef’d offers. Men do not want to screw up a Valentine’s
Day dinner/dessert so they could turn to a website like Chefd.com. Another thing I noticed was
that this graph did not show the dramatic increase between September and October like the
SimilarWeb.com graph did. I think I trust the SimilarWeb.com’s data more than Quantcast.com’s
data.
HelloFresh.com Traffic and Trends

13. In this chart, HelloFresh peaked around three million visits in September. The total visits
dropped to 2.25 million by December. It makes no sense that a meal-kit website visits would go
down during the holiday season. The only thing I can think of is their soft subscribers skipped
out more during this time because they were gone seeing family. This could account for the drop,
but it was not a quick drop, it was a steady decline over four months. I know Chef’d double it’s
visits between September and October, and HelloFresh declined by 100,000 visits. So that could
reflect that small dip, but it does not account for the total drop in visits by 800,000. Especially
since Chef’d’s visits dropped down to more normal levels in November and December. The drop
is puzzling.

14. Now this chart spans over the past year and a half. HolloFresh’s highest peak was in
May of 2016 at around 1.35 million visits. Then another peak at 1.1 million visits in February of
2017. Followed by the lowest valley in April of 2017 at 500,000 visits. The fact that there are
two distinct peaks in two different years at different point in those years in interesting. It rules
out the natural year-to-year follow of traffic. If both peaks had occurred in February, then I could
have reported a strong correlation between February and visits, but that is not the case.
Comparisons
HelloFresh.com gets somewhere between 10 to 17 times more traffic per month
compared to Chef’d.com. However, it looks like the two companies are trending in opposite
directions. Using the SimilarWeb.com graphs, HelloFresh has seen a steady decline of visits over
the past four months. While Chef’d saw an all-time high in visits three months ago. Even after a
dip the following month, the amount of total visits in December with second highest visits ever.
With Chef’d making more and more partnerships, I expect this trend to continue for the
foreseeable future. HelloFresh reliance on subscriptions could make it harder for them to get new
customers and if old customers cancel their subscriptions, it could spell trouble. Chef’d’s ability

15. to get new customers and build partnerships with major food brands gives Chef’d staying ability,
and an unlimited ceiling. The growth Chef’d can make is fun to think about.
Engagement Analysis
Chefd.com HelloFresh.com
Web
Averages
Bounce Rate % 27.63% 33.13% 40%
Page Views Per Visit 4.13 6.17 4.6
Average Visit Duration 3:15 3:26 3:10
Introduction and Definitions:
Bounce rate is the rate that someone comes to a website, sees only one page then leaves
the website. According to the information I got in class, the web average for a retail/content
website is 20% to 60%, so around 40% is the average. A retail website’s bounce rate average in
between 20% and 40%, while a content website’s bounce rate range is 40% to 60%. People can
“bounce” from a website for a multitude of reasons: purpose of website, poor landing page
design, annoying pop-ups/surveys, annoying music/videos, too many ads, long loading time,
wrong audience (non-sports fans going to espn.com), and poor search engine ranking due to
irrelevant keywords.
Page views per visit and average visit duration are closely connected. Page views per
visit are simply the number a different links a visitor clicks through in one website. The average
visit duration is the average amount of time visitors spend on the website.
Chefd.com Engagement Data:

16. Based on web averages, Chefd.com’s bounce rate of 27.63% is below the average of a
retail/content website. However, Chefd.com’s bounce rate would be just in line with the average
of retail website (between 20% and 40%). Now the pages per visit for Chef’d is right on par for
the web averages with 4.13 pages per visit while the web average is 4.6. The average visit
duration for the web is 3:10 minutes and the Chef’d average is 3:15 minutes. Both of these
metrics are great for Chef’d, it shows they are right where they need to be when it comes to
website engagement.
Video.wmv
The link above is to the introductory video on Chefd.com’s homepage. I thought it was a
nice video to show new customers exactly what Chef’d has to offer. The video shows what the
meal-kit box looks like and what the cooking instructions look like. The video also shows
multiple people making a lot of different meals. This is shown to give the customer a sense of
how easy it is to cook with their meal-kits. The slogan at the end is well thought out: “The easiest
way to cook like a pro.”
After going through multiple selections of the personalization section, this page came up.
First, it is great because it makes visitors go through multiple pages of the website in one visit.

17. Also encouraging potential customers to sign up for an account so they can save their
personalized meal kit recommendations, exclusive deals and rewards.
Now what is Chef’d doing well and what could be done to improve Chefd.com’s bounce
rate? The purpose of Chef’d is clear: Chef’d is the easiest way to learn how to cook like a pro.
The landing page design works well for the site and is visually appealing and easy to navigate.
Chef’d does not have any annoying pop-ups, surveys, or automatically playing music or video.
This is all good, if the site annoys the customer they will not come back to Chef’d. Chef’d does
not use ads on their website, instead they have links to their partners. This is smart because they
are ads without being in your face ads. The load time is decently quick, each page loads within a
couple of seconds. Chefd.com’s base audience is definitely not lower-class Americans or college
students. I would guess their target audience is upper-middle class because of the high meal-kit
prices.
Now what is Chef’d doing well and what could be done to improve Chefd.com’s page
views and time on site metrics? First of all, as I stated in the product and content analysis section
earlier in this paper, Chef’d has multiple options for different meal-kit filters. No way you could
convince me that Chef’d does not have enough product information to inform the customer.
Also, with all of these options it is crazy easy to personalize an order. All of these options are
great for customer engagement with the website. This can be seen in the screenshot below of the
website when it was zoomed out to show all of the available filter options.

18. A couple of things Chef’d does to generate user created content is the Food Critic section.
Chef’d will help customers get started as a food critic, then the customer can rate different meal-
kits. I think this is an area where Chef’d could improve. Chef’d does encourage its customers to
rate and review its meals. I do not consider that as user generated content but it is a great start.
The rate and review section for each meal is quick and easy to use. Great way to engage the
customer.

19. Another thing I saw when looking up reviews was an answer and question section. This is
perfect because the question asked in the screenshot below is probably a frequently asked
question. I loved how Chef’d tried to be personal with the customer by responding “Hi Tammy”
then giving the answer. It came across as polite and personal, which is great if you want
customer to continue to engage with your website.
After seeing the question and answers mini section in each meal kit, I found the main
FAQ page. It had an answer for nearly any question someone could think of when it came to
meal kits. Below are just a few of the frequently asked questions.

20. Another thing that could impact the average time spent on a website is the actual pictures
of the food in different ways. Now Chef’d does have slide shows of their food being made and
the final product, but they do not have pictures of the food from every angle or a zoom feature.
As we talked about in class about glasses, having multiple angles and a zoom feature in a great
addition to the engagement of your website.
In addition to the FAQ section, Chef’d has a contact us section where you can contact
Chef’d three different ways: phone, email or submit a request. This is good because it gives the
customer a variety of choices to pick how they want to contact Chef’d if they have a problem.
The screenshot below shows how simple it is to contact Chef’d.

21. HelloFresh.com Engagement Data:
Based on web averages, HelloFresh.com’s bounce rate of 33.13% is below the average of
a retail/content website. However, HelloFresh.com’s bounce rate would be just in line with the
average of retail website (between 20% and 40%). Now the pages per visit for HelloFresh is righ
well above the web averages with 6.17 pages per visit while the web average is 4.6. That is a
significant difference. The average visit duration for the web is 3:10 minutes and the HelloFresh
average is 3:26 minutes, so it is slightly above the web average but not significantly higher. Both
of these metrics are great for HelloFresh, it shows they are above average when it comes to
website engagement.
Now what is HelloFresh doing well and what could be done to improve HelloFresh.com’s
page views and time on site metrics? Since HelloFresh uses a subscription model, it is a little
harder to personalize each and every dish. But you can personalize the type of subscription you
sign up for. There are three different types with different types of food and prices. These can be
seen in the screenshot below.

22. Now what is HelloFresh doing well and what could be done to improve HelloFresh.com’s
bounce rate? The purpose of HelloFresh is clear: HelloFresh is “Your Weeknight Dinner
Solution: Delicious ingredients you’ll love to eat. Simple recipes you’ll live to cook.” The
landing page design works well for the site and is visually appealing and easy to navigate.
HelloFresh does not have any annoying pop-ups, surveys, or automatically playing music or
video. This is all good, if the site annoys the customer they will not come back to HelloFresh.
HelloFresh does not use ads on their website, instead they have pictures of their product as well
as tweets from other HelloFresh subscribers. This is smart because they are HelloFresh
endorsements without being in your face ads. The load time is decently quick, each page loads
within a couple of seconds. HelloFresh.com’s base audience is definitely not lower-class
Americans or college students. I would guess their target audience is upper-middle class couples
or families. HelloFresh’s prices are not outrageous at $8-$10 per person per meal.
I think HelloFresh provides a lot of info for their meal-kits, but they could provide more.
I wish they would let you personalize a little more, but overall does a good job. If you need

23. assistance on the website, just go to the Help Center. They will even breakdown questions based
on what product you are purchasing or having trouble with on the website.
If you cannot find an answer there, you can contact HelloFresh directly. This is also
broken down by what type of issue the customer is dealing with at the moment.
HelloFresh has rates and reviews on their meal plans page. They get their reviews from
TrustPilot. The top four reviews are shown to show HelloFresh is a good light.

24. Comparisons:
As of right now, HelloFresh is the bigger and better company, but I believe Chef’d has
the better long-term plan. Chef’d website is a little easier to navigate and has more
personalization opportunities. HelloFresh has had a three year head start on Chef’d, but Chef’d is
growing through partnerships instead of relying on subscriptions to maintain revenue. Chef’d has
better rate and review and contact us sections, so if anything goes wrong Chef’d can help you
easily. Both website’s metrics are good and right either in line or above the web average. Even
though HelloFresh has a higher bounce rate by 6%, HelloFresh gets people to visit more pages
on their website and stay slightly longer. This gives HelloFresh the advantage in the engagement
analysis.