FRESHLY · EDITORIAL + ACQUISITION
Turning a lead-gen PDF into something worth reading.
Freshly needed a cookbook of meal recipes as lead bait for a website test. It was a content-heavy request and there was no real brief. So the question I had to answer was: how do we make a downloadable booklet of recipes useful to the business and interesting to a prospective customer?
THE ASK
Make a cookbook for a quick test to generate leads.
The request was to turn a handful of recipes from our chefs into a downloadable PDF for an acquisition test. Conceptually, I wasn’t convinced a recipe book was the most obvious way to sell prepared meals—especially when the whole point of Freshly was that someone else did the cooking. I pitched other ideas for content that would be more useful for prospective customers.
But once the project was in motion, my job was to make the idea work. I partnered with our graphic design manager and art director to outline it quickly, then built an editorial concept around the recipes we had.
THE EDITORIAL IDEA
The recipes were a bit of a red herring.
A prospective Freshly customer probably wasn’t downloading this because they desperately wanted to recreate our meals at home. So I used the cookbook to do several jobs at once. That gave the book a point of view beyond “here are some recipes.” Plus, we had a fun opportunity to make something pretty.
1. Make the meals desirable
Show the complexity and care behind the food—even if most readers were unlikely to cook it themselves.
2. Explain the product
Use ingredients, tips and hacks, and nutrition info to reinforce (and repurpose) the other content we were creating.
3. Quietly sell them on time saved
Let the recipes demonstrate the work involved, then contrast that with the ease of ordering Freshly.
CONTENT + DESIGN
We needed a system we could fill quickly without making pages feel templated.
I worked with design to balance large food photography, recipes, editorial sidebars, and branded moments so the book could move between practical information and persuasion. Reusing existing assets where they made sense kept the turnaround manageable; the smaller editorial modules gave each page enough variation to stay interesting. Tips, ingredient callouts, meal-building ideas, and small bits of personality became recurring editorial devices.
Internally we often referred to the “Freshly factor”—all the things that made a meal feel thoughtful and unique rather than just convenient and quick.
SPOON FEEDING
little pieces of brand education.
The supporting content highlighted unique meal elements, useful kitchen knowledge, and the brand’s lighter side.
can’t forget the cta.
I made sure that every page pointed the prospective customer back to where they could actually buy the meals instead of making them at home.
MEET THE CHEFS
Cook like a Freshly chef. Or, you know, let us do it.
I wanted to use this page as a reminder that there are real people behind these creations. Plus, it broke up the cookbook and added more literal personality with a fun Q&A.
I used the last page to really hit home a big value prop: letting Freshly make your nutritious meals meant more time for doing the stuff you love.
making it work.
The final PDF worked as both an acquisition asset and a compact expression of the brand I’d helped build (health-forward, tasty, a little playful, and always pointing back to the convenience of the actual product). It’s a useful example of the work I most often did at Freshly: take a vague business request, find the useful story inside it, build something cool with an amazing design time, repurpose all the content work I was already doing, and get it done quickly.
I don’t have evidence that the cookbook itself became a breakout lead generator—I don’t think our acquisition team ended up launching the test when other stuff got in the way. I still love it. We took a confusing, underspecified request and turned it into something coherent and, frankly, super cute in a week.