How Frive achieved 95% employee learning engagement with Totara

Preparing its people to support ambitious growth, from £60 million to £200 million in revenue, Frive partnered with Titus Learning to launch My Frive, a flexible learning hub powered by Totara Learn.

Since launch, 95% of active employees have engaged with the platform and 85% have completed their mandatory training.

About Frive

Frive is the UK’s highest-rated chef-prepared meal-prep service. Originally founded as Lions Prep, the business grew from a mother-and-son operation into a fast-scaling food company producing hundreds of thousands of meals every week.

Frive believes its people are its greatest advantage. As the company prepared for its next phase of expansion, it wanted to ensure that the team responsible for building the business would have the knowledge, skills and opportunities to keep driving it forward.

Watch Frive’s story

Hear Aaron McCarter, Learning and Development Manager at Frive, explain how the business is building an efficient learning function to support rapid growth, and how My Frive is helping make learning scalable, inclusive and relevant across the workforce.

The challenge

Frive’s rapid growth placed new demands on learning and development.

In just 12 months, weekly meal production increased from approximately 100,000 to 200,000. Its learning platform also surpassed 500 users far earlier than expected, reaching a level the business had not anticipated for another two years.

Frive needed to move from delivering training reactively to building a structured, scalable learning function. Every employee—from chefs and production operatives to supervisors and head-office teams—needed to understand not only how to perform their role, but why their work mattered to the business and its customers.

The company also needed to:

• Standardise operational training as teams and production volumes grew.
• Strengthen onboarding and mandatory compliance training.
• Prepare supervisors and high-potential employees for management roles.
• Accommodate different roles, working patterns and learning preferences.
• Maintain accessible, reliable training records for audits.
• Create an inclusive learning experience for a diverse workforce.

Paper-based reporting was particularly time-consuming. When an auditor requested an employee’s training history, the L&D team could spend six to eight hours locating and checking records across thousands of documents.

Frive needed a solution that could provide stronger oversight without turning learning into a corporate or impersonal tick-box exercise.

The solution

After assessing dozens of potential providers, Frive selected Titus Learning to build My Frive using Totara Learn.

The goal was to create more than a place for mandatory courses. Frive wanted an accessible learning and development hub where employees could explore resources, share knowledge and take ownership of their growth.

My Frive now provides instant access to more than 600 learning resources. These include short microlearning modules, mental-health and soft-skills content, English and maths resources, leadership development and accredited food-industry compliance training from the National Skills Academy for Food and Drink.

The platform brings essential training into one environment, including food safety, allergen awareness, health and safety and HACCP learning. Totara’s reporting capabilities give Frive a central record of completions and certifications, allowing the team to produce the evidence required by auditors quickly and confidently.

Titus used Totara’s flexibility to make learning relevant to employees across the business. The My Frive homepage directs people towards timely and appropriate resources, while collaborative workspaces allow employees to share podcasts, videos and other useful content. The platform also supports cultural initiatives such as South Asian Heritage Month and Black History Month, helping it become part of the wider employee experience.

Frive combines digital learning with practical, face-to-face development. New employees receive an in-person induction that introduces the company, its purpose and the role they play in its success. Operational learning then blends demonstrations with digital standard operating procedures, videos, assessments and confirmation of competency.

A bronze, silver and gold development pathway is helping Frive build capability for the future:

• Bronze standardises the core processes employees use most frequently.
• Silver develops the knowledge required to manage exceptions and less-common processes.
• Gold prepares high-potential employees to become Frive’s future managers and leaders.

My Frive also supports a management and leadership programme for supervisors and coordinators, covering leadership fundamentals, communication, coaching, difficult conversations, team building and performance management.

The results

My Frive has achieved strong adoption across Frive’s workforce:

• 95% of active employees have engaged with the platform.
• 85% have completed their mandatory training.
• More than 600 learning resources are available in one place.
• The platform exceeded its initial 500-user band two years earlier than expected.
• Training records and certificates can be produced immediately, replacing an audit process that could previously take six to eight hours.

The platform has also helped Frive make learning more inclusive and easier to fit around a fast-moving production environment. Employees can access concise digital content on their own devices, while practical and interpersonal skills are reinforced through face-to-face learning.

Beyond the numbers, Frive is already seeing learning translate into workplace behaviour. Supervisors have begun applying communication and situational-leadership techniques in team meetings, contributing to more open dialogue and less tension within teams.

Most importantly, Frive now has the learning infrastructure to grow proactively. With plans to increase revenue from £60 million to £200 million over four years—and longer-term ambitions to increase production substantially—My Frive will help the company develop talent internally, maintain standards and prepare its next generation of leaders.