A detailed analyzing the popularity, traffic, and engagement of meal kit delivery site Chef'd.com.

1. Chef’d Popularity & Traffic Analysis
Allie Weekley
Intro to Web Publishing
WEBSITE OVERVIEW
General Company Information
Chef’d is a meal kit delivery service, started in 2015, that offers unique recipes that meet
all types of dietary needs including gluten free, vegetarian, and vegan and is easy to use at any
cooking expertise level. It is a no subscription style service that offers over a hundred
personalizable meals ranging from quick and easy to gourmet. The company started with an idea
from the founder and CEO about how to get delicious gourmet meals delivered straight to your
door and from there Chef’d was created. Chef’d meals include everything you need to prepare
delicious meals at home, with every ingredient delivered right to your door. Chef’d has a variety
of partners including big name brands such as Campbell’s, Quaker, and P.F. Chang’s. These
partners allow them to have further investment in their business as well as being able to offer
these quality food products in their meals and a reputable well-known brand name to go along
with it. When Chef’d site visitors see the 48 names of brands they are familiar with like Coca
Cola and Hershey’s they are more likely to be interested and excited to see how Chef’d has
incorporated their brand favorites into their meal kits. In addition to working with big brands
they have celebrity partners and do features on their chefs. Chef’d has generated press from
major publications including Forbes, CNBC, Fortune, and People Magazine covering topics
about the early successes Chef’d has experienced since entering the market and how meal kit
delivery is changing the modern grocery scene. Fortune.com covered the story of Campbell’s
$10 million dollar investment in Chef’d that includes a partnership, board seat, and a strategic
investment and direct stake. Chef’d approaches the meal kit delivery market by emphasizing the
wide variety of meal options and the point that customers don’t have to sign up for a monthly or
weekly subscription to use the service.
Product & Content Analysis
The Chef’d site focuses on getting customers to sign up for an account and personalize
their meal preference settings so Chef’d can prepare multiple meal recommendation options a
week in all areas including breakfast, lunch, dinner, and dessert. Once a user has selected a meal,
Chef’d allows them to see all of the meal details including a description of the meal, ingredients,
allergens, what the user will need from home, and nutrition facts. The meal page even goes as far
to list other food or drinks that would pair well with the meal. The description includes a
difficulty level, spiciness level, and how long the cook time is. In addition to the recommended
meals, they also offer “Meal Plans” which feature meals developed with partners Atkins, Weight
Watchers, the American Diabetes Association, New York Times, and Spoon University that

2. offer compatible meals with those diet plans and allow the customer to get discounts and free
shipping.
All meals have the option to be purchased for two people or four and range in price
anywhere from $9 for a small breakfast meal for two to $80 for a prime steak dinner for two.
Users also have the option to leave a review for a meal and can ask questions on the meal page
that other Chef’d users can answer for reference. Chef’d creates a community atmosphere on the
site especially for people who enjoy cooking and trying new things. Chef’d makes trying new
recipes easy because rather than buying an entire package of a particular ingredient for a meal,
the Chef’d user is given just the right amount of each ingredient and instructions. By allowing an
area for comments and reviews, Chef’d is prompting more brand interaction and participation
which would be a factor that makes the user want to come back to the Chef’d site and leave their
thoughts on the meal they tried. To further continued participation with the brand, Chef’d has an
online magazine users can flip through and emails that customers can sign up for. The
community and engagement aspect of Chef’d is a great way to continue customer’s relationships
with Chef’d and keep them purchasing meal kits.
Competing Site
Similarly to Chef’d, HelloFresh.com started in 2011 and is also a meal kit delivery
service that is tailored to your taste preferences and household size. HelloFresh also has options
that cater to a variety of diets including vegetarian, gluten free, and vegan. HelloFresh is about
$10 per meal but they have a variety of coupon codes and specials available for a customer’s first
delivery and coupons available through celebrity partners and online influencers. HelloFresh
offers “menu” options including a classic menu, veggie menu, and a family menu. The classic
and veggie menus take a little longer to prepare and are more eccentric dishes in general. The
biggest difference between HelloFresh and Chef’d was the timeline in which different menu
options were available. HelloFresh offers certain dishes on certain weeks and is always mixing it
up. However, this leads to a possibility that there might not be any menu options a consumer
likes at the moment where Chef’d has all of their meals available for order any time. In regards
to press, like Chef’d, HelloFresh has received a lot of positive press, receiving praise for their
delicious and convenient recipes and noting the expansion of their team. HelloFresh also boasts
being a “no commitment necessary” company and that users can “pause or cancel at any time”
but unlike Chef’d does not say that a subscription is not required.
POPULARITY ANALYSIS
Link Analysis
Total Backlinks No. of Referring Domains Average No. of Backlinks / Domain

3. Chef'd 5,900 556 10.6
HelloFresh 5,600 899 6.2
When looking into the popularity of a website, it is key to understand the difference
between a backlink and a referring domain. A backlink is simply a link from another website
to yours. A referring domain is a website that refers to yours. It is important to note that a
domain can establish several backlinks and that overall, if other sites are linking to you this
serves as a positive endorsement to your site and its content.
Upon evaluating the total number of backlinks for both Chef’d and HelloFresh, they are
extremely comparable, much like most factors with Chef’d and HelloFresh. However, the
number of referring domains is where the biggest difference is noticeable. HelloFresh has over
300 more referring domains than Chef’d does, meaning more sites are simply linking to
HelloFresh than they are to Chef’d. As far as age goes, HelloFresh has 3 years on Chef’d and it’s
likely that in those years, they generated a following or at the least, awareness about their
products and services. More time in business would lead to more users spreading their
HelloFresh experiences with their friends, family, and online following. Chef’d is not far behind
at all, showing that the benefits of the Chef’d product line and the services they offer are helping
them be a market frontrunner despite overall less time in the market.
Analysis of Link Quality for Chef’d - Top 10 Referring Domains
The following sites are the top 10 referring domains for Chefd.com:
1. Foodboxhq.com
○ FoodBoxHQ (6 links) is a high quality site dedicated to helping users find their
perfect food delivery box for their taste and lifestyle. This site ranks their top
favorites based on elements such as food quality, taste, price per serving, diets
accomodated. This site is great for Chef’d because it is a quality site that
customers deciding which box is right for them might reference and it allows
Chef’d to show off its strong suits and really sell what makes them unique.
However, it tee’s Chef’d up against 9 of its closest competitors and lists pros and
cons of Chef’d in comparison to the other meal kit delivery services.
2. Poststats.com
● I wasn’t able to find any details on Post Stats as a site and could also not find any
details in regards to how this site related to Chef’d. I would classify this site as a
low quality site simply because of its lack of relevance and presence to the topic.
If I were to guess, this is a site dedicated to displaying website statistics and
numbers related to website performance.
3. Usatodaysports.com

4. ● USA Today (5 links) is a very reputable and high quality, well known source that did an
article that was a “meal kit guide” that offered readers a click through slideshow to see
what new meal kit delivery services are available. They did one in December of 2017
focusing on Chef’d, Plated, Dinnerly, Real Eats, and Sun Basket.showing pictures of
meals and weighing the pros and cons of each. The comparison to competitors and the
chance to showcase features is great here for Chef’d in the same way as the Food Box
HQ site but with USA Today being a major and well known publication, this recognition
is big for Chef’d. USA Today is also helping Chef’d appeal to an athletic group of
customers by featuring it on their USA Today Sports site.
4. Onecarribean.org
○ One Caribbean was an interesting site to see that Chef’d had backlinks on because
upon navigating through the site, I was unable to find any backlinks to Chef’d or
anything food or meal kit delivery related. The site seemed to lack quality and
was not concise about the purpose of the site, primarily saying it is a Caribbean
Tourism Organization with a side focus on research and statistics.
5. Foodindustryexecutive.com
○ Food Industry Executive (2 links) is a relatively quality site. The site seems to be
dedicated to food industry news and current events with information on the latest
start-ups to the changing prices of certain food products. Chef’d gets its feature in
two articles focusing on meal kit delivery services. The first being one where
Chef’d is compared to competitor Blue Apron and HelloFresh. Another article
goes over Hershey Company’s recent partnership with Chef’d. These are all press
releases that have the possibility to make it to the “Press” page on the Chef’d
website and are overall great exposure for the brand.
6. Menshealth.com
● Being one of the partners of Chef’d and a major reputable high quality
publication, Men’s Health (2 links) has a article from August 2017 titled “The
Best Meal Delivery Services You Should Try Right Now”. They go into detail
about 5 meal kit delivery services and how they are all unique and what they offer
depending on the user. Chef’d is called out as the meal kit for “the cook that loves
a challenge”. They mention the variety of choices available as well as shoutout to
their own Chef’d line that is healthy and easy to prepare.
7. Nytimes.com
○ One of the biggest and best referring domains for Chef’d is the New York Times
(1 link). Being one of the most well known publications in the United States, this
is an extremely reputable site to be featured on. The New York Times did an
article in April 2016 about meal kit delivery, doing the same thing similar articles
have done by comparing each service to the next. The New York Times called
Chef’d “the leader” for being the only service that doesn't’ require a subscription.
8. Sidechef.com

5. ○ Side Chef (50+ links) is a high quality referring domain for Chef’d because it is a
site that outlines step by step cooking and recipes for users. In most instances,
there are recipes with appealing photos of the food but in other cases, the site
links to meal kit delivery services such as Chef’d. The site uses Chef’d photos of
the food but ultimately links them back to the Chef’d site to follow through with
the recipe and purchase. This amount of links is great for Chef’d and directs users
looking for new recipes to go to Chef’d site for subscription-free food delivery.
9. Atkins.com
○ Atkins is another big partner of Chef’d ( 35+ links) and has dedicated a major part
of their site to Chef’d in ways that Men’s Health did not. Under their recipes tab,
Atkins has displayed pictures of all of the Atkins recipes with a “buy now” call to
action that links to where the user could purchase the meal kit from Chef’d
website. Atkins allows their site visitors to read a small bit about what Chef’d is
and includes information about how Chef’d aligns with the Atkins diet.
10. Techcrunch.com
● Techcrunch is a site dedicated to profiling startups and technology industry news.
Techcrunch is a high quality site (5 links) that attracts 2 million users to its site
each month and has multiple backlinks to Chef’d. This is great exposure and is
different than other sites that Chef’d has been featured on, which were mostly
sites about the best meal kit delivery. Their articles on Chef’d cover topics
ranging from what the experience is like to cook out of a Chef’d kit, how Chef’d
was started, and how Chef’d utilized crowdfunding to generate sales and
engagement.
TRAFFIC ANALYSIS
Visit Analysis
Chef'd HelloFresh
Avg. Monthly Visits
[ According to
Similar Web] 156,667 2,720,000
Introduction and Definitions:
The given chart above outlines the average monthly site visits for both Chef’d and
HelloFresh. A visit is the best evaluation that a person or individual visited a website. According
to Similar Web, Chef’d has about 156,667 average monthly site visitors. Considering the amount
of time the Chef’d website has been up and operating and the notability of the site, these

6. numbers seem very appropriate. What surprised me the most was the stark contrast to
HelloFresh’s numbers. HelloFresh has a monthly average of 2,720,000 site visitors, a much
higher amount than Chef’d for being a major competitor.
Chef’d Traffic & Trends Chart
HelloFresh Traffic & Trends Chart
Above are screenshots of Chef’d and HelloFresh’s traffic charts that outline total visits
over the last 6 months as well as engagement numbers for both.

7. Comparisons:
The traffic for Chef’d has an up and down trend and saw a major spike in the October
month. While it’s not totally clear what made traffic go up in October, it seemed that October is
when the most articles were being published about Chef’d. Most of these articles were ones
comparing Chef’d to other meal kit delivery services. Because Chef’d is a relatively new
business, this might be some of the first big exposure opportunities. It is also notable that in one
of the biggest months for food consumption and purchasing, November, traffic for Chef’d went
down. This is likely due to the fact that people are probably not interested in meal kits or
necessarily healthy eating at this time of the year. Since November, Chef’d has only seen traffic
rise.
HelloFresh has some incredibly impressive traffic numbers when compared to Chef’d.
They have surpassed a million average monthly visitors as well as 2 million. HelloFresh’s traffic
numbers are pretty consistent month to month. This could be due to the fact that they are an older
company and the website has been up longer. They are not in the growth stage as much as they
are in a stable place currently and are seeming to be maintaining their numbers. Increased
awareness and exposure is likely the reason that HelloFresh has higher traffic. I personally had
heard of and visited HelloFresh’s site prior to this study but had not heard of or visited the
Chef’d website.
Engagement Analysis:
Chef'd HelloFresh Web Averages
Bounce Rate % 27.63% 33.13% 40.50%
Page Views Per Visit 4.13 6.17 4.6
Average Visit
Duration 3:15 minutes 3:26 minutes 190.4 seconds
Introduction & Definitions:
The bounce rate is the percentage of visitors to a website that navigate away after
viewing only one page. The page views per visit is the number of pages of a particular website
are visited in a single visit. The average visit duration is the amount of time a user spent on the
website in the visit.
Chef’d Engagement Data:
Chef’d has a lower bounce rate than HelloFresh which means that fewer people are
visiting only one page and then leaving the website. This is a good thing for Chef’d because it
means users are taking the opportunity to look around at what the site has to offer and check out
multiple pages. However, Chef’d only has 4.13 page views per visit which is a low number
considering how many pages with great information Chef’d has on their site. On the other hand,

8. an average of 4 pages are being seen by visitors which could give them a lot of information about
the brand and encourage them to make a purchase in their time there. The average visit duration
for Chef’d is 3:15 minutes on the site which seems like enough time to get an idea of what the
site and brand are about but not necessarily enough time to look around at the recipes, make an
account, and tailor meal preferences to your personal diet. Chef’d has some room for growth in
their engagement data but certainly have decent numbers.
HelloFresh Engagement Data:
HelloFresh has a high numbers of engagement and traffic and that is consistent in their
page views per visit with 6.17 page views per site visit. A factor that I think contributes to this is
HelloFresh’s homepage setup. The only button visible to the user is a command to “view plans”
where they are encouraged to look at other pages on the site and start browsing meal plan options
available. All of HelloFresh’s navigation buttons lead the user closer and closer to the purchase
window and likely make them stay on the site longer as a result. HelloFresh’s user average time
on site is 3: 26 minutes which is likely because HelloFresh has a variety of engaging content for
the user to browse including reviews, FAQs, and well as a chatbot where users can ask questions
to a representative. However, Chef’d also had engaging content on their site including videos, a
chatbot, and information about their mobile app.
Comparisons:
One of the biggest noticeable comparisons between Chef’d and HelloFresh is the page
views per visit difference. I found that HelloFresh encouraged browsing much more than Chef’d
does. HelloFresh limits information on the homepage so that in order to learn more, the user
must click through multiples pages on the site to read more. HelloFresh opts for a brighter and
more detailed web page design as well while Chef’d has a more subtle and neutral design.
Chef’d has a better bounce rate and that seems to be because Chef’d has a very easy site
to read and skim. The text is in small chunks and the layout is easy for the eyes to move over and
the headlines are appealing and make the site user want to check out more of what Chef’d has to
say and offer. HelloFresh’s homepage cuts right to the product information where the Chef’d
website talks about partners, chefs, and celebrity ambassadors. The user has to click to other
pages to learn more about Chef’d which has a positive effect on their bounce rate.

9. The two sites overall have pretty comparable average visit times, however, HelloFresh’s
is a little longer. When navigating through the Chef’d website and going through the process of
personalizing what meals I preferred, I noticed a few layout things that were a bit frustrating to
deal with that could lead to a user wanting to leave the site and abandon their personalization
progress. When in the personalization window, answering questions, I was forced to scroll down
each time to see the last few answer possibilities and to proceed onto the next question. While
this is a small thing, it was enough for me notice that I kept scrolling up and down the page to
read the question and then see what my answer choices were.
While this isn’t something that everyone would notice when using the website, it was a
frustration I didn’t notice when selecting a meal plan on HelloFresh and made the experience just
a little more challenging than necessary. HelloFresh also had bigger more detailed photos of the
food which could be a factor that could encourage the user to stick around on the site and look
through the options more.