Going the Last Mile with Sea to Table
Larabee created an experiential recipe for a leading DTC seafood company that sets their customers up for greater success and deeper connection.
A preview video for Sea to Table's interactive recipe, Fried Fish Grandpa Bobby Style
What is the “last mile solution” for consumer brands? It’s investing in that final touchpoint with customers after they’ve purchased your product and brought it into their homes. Here is a case-study on an experiential recipe we created in partnership with Sea to Table.
In the earliest days of the company, Larabee was called Cookable. Contrary to what the name implies, our primary objective wasn’t to make cooking more doable; rather, it was to create a new kind of digital recipe experience that was as impactful as in-person learning.
When you’re being taught how to make something by someone (be it a friend, family member, or professional), you’re shown what to do and how to do it, your questions are answered, and you’re offered modifications and corrections when needed. But there’s also something deeper at work. You’re learning within and inside of an insanely rich and multisensory context: conversations, aromas, kinesthetic stimuli, and visual cues all intermingle into one collective experience. When you remake that dish days, months, or even years later, it’s not uncommon for even the minutiae of those memories to come flooding back.
Written recipes don’t contain that brand of magic, nor are they intended to. They’re elegant constructions in and of themselves – precise and succinct documentations for how a dish comes together. This isn’t to say that they don’t have their own opportunities for wonder and charm. A scribbled annotation on the margins of a recipe, a much-loved community cookbook bound by a plastic spiral, or any recipe by Alison Roman for that matter exudes life. But written recipes are historically designed to be references, not teachers.
“A recipe is supposed to be a formula, a means prescribed for producing a desired result, whether that be an atomic weapon, a well-trained Pekingese, or an omelet.”
We set out to scale the impactfulness of in-person learning by bringing recipes to life – not by creating long-form videos for passive consumption, nor by doing away with written recipes altogether. Rather, we deconstructed what happens between experts and novices when they’re interacting with each other, and adapted those interpersonal workings for a modern world. Since then, we’ve tested and honed our methods successfully across industries such as manufacturing and life sciences, but cooking was always our first love.
Sea to Table
Sean Dimin of Sea to Table is a long-time friend of the company and one of the first people that came to mind when our team started talking about delivering immersive recipe experiences to customers. Sea to Table works with U.S.-based fisheries to source responsibly caught seafood for families across the country. Given the quality of their product, their focused mission, and Sean’s immense charisma, we knew all the “ingredients” were there for an outstanding deliverable.
Off the bat, we set out to create an interactive recipe that gave their customers a unique touchpoint with Sean and the company. To this end, the recipe had to have a personal backstory, it had to reflect the ethos of the company, and it had to be absolutely delicious. Sea to Table was invested in creating value for their customers, and we were invested in creating value for Sea to Table. No one wanted to waste anyone’s time and money with an impersonal recipe that generated unremarkable results.
N of One
Cookbooks will have anywhere from 75 to 300 or more recipes. Popular sites like New York Times Cooking and America’s Test Kitchen contain thousands in their database. Certain recipes capture the attention of the masses and take on a mythical life of their own, like the iconic Marian Burros Plum Torte or J. Kenji Lopez Alt’s Crispy Roast Potatoes. Most will fall into obscurity, regardless of how well researched and beautifully written they may be. Good recipe creators are worth their weight in saffron, but in the world of digital and analog media, the appetite for volume is undeniable.
Team Larabee likes to see how much depth we can build into one recipe. Novelists and video game designers routinely partake in a process called worldbuilding when they make great efforts to construct the detailed settings in which their stories take place. Similarly, we understand that a recipe can have its own rich context, its own peaks and valleys along its journey. This journey can look and feel different depending on who is charting the course (the recipe creator) as well as who is embarking on the task at hand (the home cook). So, even a simple chocolate chip recipe that comes together in minutes can encapsulate different worlds of information. A science-oriented recipe creator might be focused on teaching the chemical reaction of starches, sugars, and fats, while someone else might be interested in the history and evolution of cookies.
Within the recipe, there are virtually unlimited tangents a person can go in. What are the best leavening agents? Should you use chocolate chips, drops, chunks, feves, or mini-grammes? For the maximum crisp-to-chew ratio, at what point should you take them out of the oven? The wonderful thing about these elements is that they’re largely subjective. Two equally accomplished professionals will have wildly different approaches and answers depending on what they value or have experienced.
We’re also fascinated by how one recipe can go from total novelty to permanent fixture in individuals’ lives. If you attempt a new dish and the payoff is high on flavor and praise, chances are you’re going to make it again and again. As you grow in confidence, the tricky or hard parts that took concentration in the beginning become routinized and easy. In time, that dish might change and evolve into something uniquely your own that you’re able to reproduce without so much as a glance at a recipe card. As your friends request them for potlucks or your kids recall them with nostalgia, they become a part of you. These kinds of recipes are not one-offs but investments in time and energy. There was an amazing opportunity to create a new type of art form that spoke to the multifaceted and multidimensional nature of cooking.
“Neurons that fire together, wire together.”
Empathetic Design with Sea to Table
To bring instructions and guidance to life, we engage our clients in a series of exercises called empathetic design. To put it simply, it’s designing lessons with the needs of our experts and learners in mind. Experts possess a wealth of information that’s been amassed over years, and have a set of values and principles that guide their work. Learners come with diverse needs and learning styles, but also share similar frustrations, obstacles, and questions. They also don’t always know what they don’t know.
With Sean Dimin, we landed fairly quickly on a recipe that carried a great deal of meaning: fried fish in the style of his Grandpa Bobby. Sean’s paternal grandfather was the first person to instill in him a love of fish. Such was the closeness between them that when Sean was eleven years old, the joke among his siblings was that he had won the “Favorite Grandchild of the Year” award thirteen times. Growing up spending summers with his grandparents out on Long Island, his grandmother would always frequently cook fish “Grandpa Bobby Style,” which meant strips of white fish that were soaked in a milk and egg wash, then breaded and fried to a crispy, crunchy golden brown.
Our shared goal was to guide Sea to Table customers through the successful execution of this same dish whilst introducing them to a formative relationship that had meant so much to Sean. If Sean were in their kitchens with them, what stories would he tell about his grandfather or himself? What questions would they ask, and when? What were the opportunities for education and delight? Where could they get confused or stuck, and how could we help them through it in a practical way? All of these questions informed how we storyboarded and developed the lesson.
We also wanted to create small moments that had the potential to stick with customers for years. A personal example that I always go back to is when I learned how to crack open eggs from Chef Andre Soltner. It was a simple tutorial made significantly more memorable due to the personal story he told me about his own frugal upbringing, and to this day there is not an egg I crack where I don’t recall that interaction. As they say: neurons that fire together, wire together. When actions are connected to memories, the recall on both can be more than the sum of its parts.
The Deliverable
With the help of an outstanding documentary filmmaker and cinematographer Alfie Alcantara, we filmed all of the content for this lesson at The Upstate Table, a gorgeous culinary studio by Rebecca Miller Ffrench. The studio resides in the historic Fuller Building in Kingston, New York, where Sea to Table also has its headquarters. Between Alfie’s artistry, the incredible backdrop, and Sean’s extreme amiability, we were confident in our ability to deliver a unique form of elevated content for Sea to Table and their customers.
Sean Dimin, founder of Sea to Table
The way we film and edit content is based on the features and functionalities of our interactive media display, the Larabee Player. This player is custom built by us to be on-demand and interacted with in real time. Looping videos and short instructions replace text-heavy explanations, pages of blog text, or 20-minute long-form videos. Short insights for tips or stories are made available for whenever the learner needs or wants them. The end result is a delivery format that meets and scaffolds learners where they are, all the while providing a personal and emotional touchpoint with the individual behind the lesson.
Whether you’re involved in food, medicine, manufacturing, or any other industry that involves sequences of steps, consider the array of complexity of your lessons and skills. Take the most complex “recipe” you have, and imagine what an intuitive and confidence-building platform could mean for your audience. The beauty of Larabee lessons is that they can range from purely pragmatic and straightforward to entertaining and delightful. The framework we created is as applicable to beginners and novices as it is to skilled or advanced experts.
We embedded our Player right into Sea to Table’s website, with their colors and branding elements, for a seamless customer experience. Their customers receive QR codes in their shipments that they can scan to be taken straight to the lesson landing page. For more information or a request for demo, reach out to us directly at hello@heylarabee.com and we’d be happy to connect with you.
Click below to learn how to make Fried Fish Grandpa Bobby Style. Want to place an order for Northwest Pacific cod? You can do that here.
