FoodHero automates retention & drives measurable revenue at scale

Environmental sustainability and providing affordable food for Canadian families—this is the noble blend of causes that makes FoodHero so unique and its mission so important. Leveraging partnerships with some of the largest grocery stores across Canada (Sobeys, Safeway, IGA, and more), the FoodHero app brings a surplus food marketplace to consumers with discounts of up to 60%.

Surplus or near-expired food typically ends up as waste in a landfill, a destination many wrongly assume is decomposition-friendly. In reality, sending food compost to landfills is responsible for creating significantly higher methane emissions and water waste.

As the cost of living continues to rise, FoodHero’s mission is to help everyone save money on groceries while educating consumers on the positive environmental impact of reducing food waste.

Although they had an existing messaging structure in place during their initial expansion throughout Quebec, FoodHero’s engagement strategy had room for improvement. Using different tools for different messaging channels can be a recipe for disjointed communication with users who expect a timely, intuitive experience across all devices in concert with one another.

With a massive national launch across the rest of Canada underway, FoodHero needed a way to avoid this fragmentation at scale and unify engagement to ensure a successful expansion.

With generous discounts at the core of the FoodHero experience, mobile messaging has been instrumental in communicating this value, especially as the company underwent its nationwide rollout. Nowhere is this more critical than post-app-install, where timely engagement through push notifications, in-app messages (IAMs), and email ensures that new users quickly understand the benefits of surplus food shopping and take action.

From onboarding and in-app conversions to cart recovery and re-engagement, FoodHero identified OneSignal as the most efficient platform for guiding users through their journey and maximizing retention. OneSignal’s integration and automation capabilities have also been key to implementing FoodHero’s new promo code system, allowing them to precisely target users most likely to engage.

Beyond its effectiveness, OneSignal’s ease of use and versatility have been invaluable for FoodHero’s small but agile team. The platform powers messaging for both consumers and FoodHero partners (merchants), ensuring seamless communication across different audiences. With pre-built templates, drag-and-drop customization, and flexible HTML editing, the FoodHero team can focus on executing high-impact campaigns without worrying about maintaining brand consistency or handling complex messaging logistics.

For a fast-growing company operating at scale, OneSignal eliminates the headaches of managing large-scale messaging campaigns, allowing FoodHero to stay focused on their mission: helping users save money while reducing food waste.

Grocery inventory is constantly in flux, and for FoodHero, timely communication is everything. With new items being added to the app twice daily, users need to act fast to take advantage of fresh discounts before items sell out. By leveraging push notifications through OneSignal, FoodHero keeps users informed about new deals in real time, creating a sense of urgency that directly drives conversions.

Each morning, a carefully timed push notification highlights the latest available items, boosting daily revenue by up to 10%. When this specific push isn’t sent, FoodHero sees a direct impact: sales stagnate noticeably, and valuable surplus food risks going to waste. With OneSignal, FoodHero ensures that users receive the right message at the right time, effectively transforming engagement into action and maximizing both revenue and food rescue efforts.

For FoodHero, educating users is just as important as engaging them. Not every user who downloads the app immediately creates an account or understands the value of complimenting their grocery shopping with FoodHero. That’s why FoodHero relies on OneSignal’s Journeys automation to seamlessly guide new users toward conversion.

Their onboarding journey ensures that users who don’t sign up right away are automatically sent a series of educational messages—via both push and email—breaking down common misconceptions about expiration dates, food waste, and the environmental impact of surplus food. By proactively clearing up these misunderstandings, FoodHero builds trust, reinforces its mission, and nudges users toward taking action.

Beyond onboarding, cart abandonment recovery is another critical use case. With perishable inventory, every abandoned cart is a missed opportunity—not just for revenue, but for reducing food waste. FoodHero’s most-triggered journey targets users who abandon their carts within the last hour, reminding them to complete their purchase before the deals disappear. This simple but effective automation has proven to be a game-changer, recouping up to 10% of abandoned carts month-over-month through timely push and email reminders.

Operating nationwide in both English and French, FoodHero also takes advantage of Journeys’ multilingual and multichannel capabilities. Rather than managing separate campaigns for different languages or juggling email and push across disparate systems, they streamline everything in one automated workflow. Using OneSignal’s Mixpanel integration, they segment audiences efficiently, delivering personalized, timely messages at scale.

With Canada stretching across multiple time zones, what works for a user in Toronto at 10 AM ET isn’t ideal for someone in Vancouver. This challenge extends beyond their daily inventory push notifications to all messaging channels, requiring a smart approach to delivery timing.

Rather than manually scheduling messages for different regions, FoodHero relies on OneSignal’s Intelligent Delivery to optimize send times automatically. By leveraging historical engagement data, OneSignal ensures that each user receives push notifications, emails, and other messages at the time they’re most likely to open and act on them. The result? Time-sensitive deals reach users when they’re ready to shop—no matter where they live.

Building on these deep audience segments, FoodHero fine-tunes personalization even further by leveraging Mixpanel’s behavioral data to tailor every message to the right audience. Before a campaign even begins, users are pre-segmented in Mixpanel based on key behaviors—such as whether they’ve made a purchase, added a credit card, or need to update their preferences. Using auto-export, this segmentation data is continuously synced with OneSignal, ensuring that messaging stays dynamic and relevant.

By combining behavior-based segmentation with OneSignal’s personalization tools, FoodHero ensures that every message speaks directly to the user. Merge tags allow notifications to address each user individually, making them feel timely and personal rather than generic blasts. Whether it’s a gentle nudge to complete a purchase or a reminder to update payment details, every interaction is crafted to resonate with the user’s unique journey—ultimately increasing engagement and driving more conversions.

Understanding how users interact with messages is just as important as sending them. With OneSignal’s Mixpanel integration, FoodHero gains a powerful way to track and analyze user behavior after each campaign, giving them full visibility into the impact of their messaging.

By linking messaging data with user actions, FoodHero can monitor engagement at a granular level. They can follow each campaign ID, subject line, and notification, then analyze what happens next—did the user open the message? Did they add an item to their cart? Did they complete a purchase? This two-way data connection allows them to refine their engagement strategies in real time.

With this data, FoodHero can also build deeper audience segments for retargeting. If a user frequently opens notifications but never converts, they can be nudged with a personalized offer. If someone adds items to their cart but doesn’t check out, they can be reminded with a timely push or email—ensuring that no potential sale slips through the cracks.

As FoodHero continues to grow, they are exploring new ways to deepen user engagement and foster a stronger sense of community. One area of focus is leveraging Journeys to keep potential affiliate partners informed and engaged, ensuring they have the latest updates on FoodHero’s initiatives so they can tailor their own content accordingly.

Within the app, FoodHero also aims to give users direct access to their personal impact reports, helping them see the tangible results of their choices. From tracking how much money they’ve saved to measuring their contribution to reducing CO₂ emissions, these insights will make sustainability more personal and rewarding. Looking ahead, they plan to package this data into personalized OneSignal messaging, delivering meaningful updates that reinforce their mission and keep users engaged in their food-saving journey.