For over 60 years, WeightWatchers has been helping members achieve their goals with the latest behavioral and nutritional science, clinical research and medical interventions, educational content and an incredibly supportive and like-minded community to make maintaining healthy habits easier.

The world’s leading global weight management organization, WeightWatchers offers a full menu of options to meet a member’s weight health needs from proven behavior change techniques to access to clinical support, including medication for eligible members. Today it encourages over 3 million members to adopt practical lifestyle changes including healthy eating, physical activity and a positive mindset. 

Headquartered in New York City, the company operates with a fully distributed team across the globe. WeightWatchers provides service directly to members as well as in B2B relationships with healthcare companies. 

In 2014, WeightWatchers decided to transform the member experience through digital technology, making search essential to its success.

The challenge

Centralizing data across multiple databases

As WeightWatchers membership has grown in recent years, so has its need for a scalable and highly secure way of handling it. 

When adopting its digital platform, WeightWatchers recognized it had duplicate databases across multiple systems. The company decided to centralize its data in a bid to create data cohesion. However, several data sets were too large, making it different to query them with existing tools. 

WeightWatchers began to look for a vendor with the indexing expertise needed to handle the scale of their massive databases. Algolia provided the scale and strong integration capabilities needed to support WeightWatchers’ data and search goals. 

The solution

Supporting massive amounts of data scale

To support the company’s terabytes of data, including sensitive records of around 60 million past and present members, WeightWatchers adopted Algolia’s advanced indexing capabilities and Algolia Vault. 

“Algolia’s indexing capabilities allow us to query across terabytes of data. It’s an impressive feat,” suggests Ramanjot Bhatia, senior manager of data science at WeightWatchers. Bhatia is responsible for managing development work related to Algolia. 

“The level of enterprise support to run a 2TB search index efficiently at production and scale is definitely a big, big feature,” Bhatia says. “A rule of thumb is you basically search as much as you can fit into a single machine memory, perhaps 100GB. This is way bigger than that and allows us to expose members to more data.” 

Algolia Vault, which provides AES-256 disk encryption at rest and a configurable firewall, plays a crucial role in safeguarding WeightWatchers’ sensitive data at scale. 

The company’s records for millions of past and present members include personally identifiable information (PII) that must be secured. Algolia Vault allows WeightWatchers to efficiently retrieve relevant member information from its vast data pool while maintaining privacy and compliance requirements. 

The result

Successful implementation and customer service excellence

Algolia has been implemented widely across the WeightWatchers app and is used for applications such as food search, recipe search and member coaching, underscoring its self-service capabilities. Algolia features have been fully integrated across WeightWatchers systems to enhance the overall experience. Working with Algolia for a decade, the solution has scaled alongside WeightWatchers as it has continued to digitally transform and modernize its approach. 

“The solution’s rapid indexation speed has significantly improved functionality,” says Zach Norcross, software engineer at WeightWatchers. He says two specific Algolia capabilities have been of the greatest benefits to him: personalization and the use of indexing replicas. 

Personalization improved search results and helped to reduce the size of data being indexed. Through personalization, WeightWatchers was able to optimize data storage while improving member experiences. Meanwhile, he says, replica indexes allows different kinds of member searches using the same data sets, reducing data duplication but allowing for diverse types of searches. 

At the heart of WeightWatchers’ implementation success is strong support from the Algolia customer service team, according to Reka Daniel-Weiner, director of data science at WeightWatchers. 

“While Algolia is very easy from a self-serve perspective, whenever a question or difficulty comes up, Algolia customer service is there,” Daniel-Weiner says. “What I’ve seen from Algolia customer service is just exceptional.” 

It’s an opinion echoed across the WeightWatchers team: “Our Algolia CSMs are exceptional,” Norcross says. “They are always ahead of the curve. There were instances where we would be internally planning, and we hadn't mentioned it to Alogilia yet, and Chris and Jake would come to our biweekly or monthly meeting and bring it up. They knew we had a problem to solve.” 

“Exceptional customer service. One of the best I've ever seen.” Zach Norcross, software engineer at WeightWatchers.