How Lola's Kitchn grew paid subscriptions 220%

A five-person kitchen, a custom subscription site built on Hummz, and 10+ hours a week handed back, all within four weeks of launch.

At a glance

The short version

Lola's Kitchn makes fresh, human-grade food for dogs, one dog's plan at a time. They needed an order flow that captures each dog's details and builds the right meal plan, plus a way out of managing daily prep by hand. Hummz replaced their WordPress setup with a custom site on Store, Forms, CMS, and Notify, added a pet profile and calorie calculator, and moved daily prep and dispatch into the system. Within four weeks of launch, paid subscriptions were up 220% and meal planning gave back 10+ hours a week.

The challenge

Fresh dog food isn't one-size-fits-all. Every dog needs the right recipe and the right portion, so the order flow has to capture each dog's details and build a plan around them. Lola's Kitchn couldn't do that on WordPress. The site was cumbersome to maintain, restricted in what it could do, and the ordering experience worked against them.

The kitchen ran on manual effort too. Every day the team checked the recipe and quantity for each dog, worked out how much of each recipe to cook, ordered raw materials, and sorted pause requests, plan changes, and delivery-address updates by hand. On a five-person team, that planning was a tax on people who should have been cooking and growing the business.

The solution

Hummz started by mapping the whole thing end to end. Order placement, procurement, meal prep, dispatch, follow-up, and the feedback and snags customers hit along the way. That picture shaped both the build and the tech stack.

Then the Hummz team built Lola's Kitchn a custom site on Store, Forms, CMS, and Notify. Store runs products, inventory, orders, discounts, invoicing, and shipping.

The order flow now starts with the dog. A pet profile and a built-in calorie calculator turn each dog's details into the right meal plan before checkout. Subscriptions became self-serve, too: a customer can pause and resume, or change a delivery address for a set period, without emailing anyone.

Behind the counter, the daily grind moved into the system. Hummz built custom reports for daily meal prep and dispatch, so the team sees exactly which recipes and quantities to cook. Personalised labels print for every meal package. And a custom integration with a third-party routing tool pushes delivery status back to customers as notifications.

The results

Subscriptions +220% · 10+ hrs/week saved · Wastage −20% · Lighthouse ~60 → 95+

Within four weeks of launch, paid subscriptions were up 220% and the team had 10+ hours a week back from meal planning. Wastage from incorrect meal preps fell 20%. The new site's Lighthouse performance score climbed from around 60 to 95+.

The team measured it the plain way. Order counts before and after, time spent on planning, and the number of meals discarded to bad planning before and after.

So Lola's Kitchn can serve customers better on ordering and subscriptions, cook more meals, and handle a bigger order volume without the manual drag.

We make food for one dog at a time, and now our site does too. A pet parent enters their dog's details and gets the right plan, and on our side the daily prep just tells us what to cook. We got our week back.

— Vivek Bhaman – CEO/Founder of Lola’s Kitchn

For other subscription and made-to-order businesses

Plenty of businesses run on made-to-order subscriptions: a meal plan, a custom kit, anything built to the customer. If that's you, the lesson from Lola's Kitchn is that the storefront and the back-of-house shouldn't be two separate jobs. The order should build the plan, and the plan should tell the kitchen what to do.

That's what Hummz Store, Forms, CMS, and Notify do together: one system from the order to the doorstep.