Adelie Foods

Gravitywell has built a new business-critical cloud-based B2B customer portal for Adelie Foods. Their customers, many of which are high-street brands, can now use an elegant and intuitive interface to order products (of which Adelie sell 3 million per week), set up standing orders and perform lots of other self-service tasks, far surpassing the average eCommerce platform.

The customer portal —a £1m project— was nominated for the Sandwich & FTG Business Development Award at The Sammies 2019.

"The new customer portal has handled £14m of order value in 2018 alone, for 10s of thousands of stores across hundreds of household names"

Adelie Foods is the UK's leading Food-to-Go supplier with 26,000 retail outlets and an annual turnover of £400m, and chances are you've eaten at least one of their sandwiches. Although they manufacture everything themselves at various locations in the country, they mostly sell direct to major brands who relabel the products before they hit the shelves.

Until Adelie spoke to Gravitywell they were taking thousands of orders every day via fax machine and through their call centres. We were asked to design and develop a replacement ordering platform for all of Adelie’s customer types. The launch of the new system is just the first step in a digital transformation for the company that will provide £millions in cost savings and returns.

There are many features in the new customer portal that make ordering simple and improve the relationship with customers: live ordering and updates, cut-offs, bulk order uploads, EDI orders, multiple delivery points, standing & recurring orders, reporting, customer service features, Sale or Return and lots more.

Adelie’s customers now have a much faster and more automated ordering process. User error is substantially reduced. Plus, self-service means that that customers can manage their orders at a convenient time. All of this adds up to improved relationships with customers. But of course, the added benefit is that customer service costs are greatly reduced

We wanted to make the process for customers as intuitive and flexible as possible so the user experience should be similar to high-end consumer eCommerce websites. Many retail managers have very busy days and so the ordering platform needs to work at anytime and on any device. 

You can see the benefits for users in a video that Gravitywell produced for Adelie's sales team: real-time ordering, lists and schedules, multiple users and multiple stores, live customer support and live order updates.

The design & planning process was highly complex as we had to integrate with legacy ERP systems and meet the needs of many different types of users. We worked collaboratively with logistics and customer support team members to develop the user experience for a revolutionary system within the Food-to-Go industry.

We designed a platform that would scale up as more retail units and more users joined the service. It also needed to be highly robust and cope with seasonal order spikes as the system is a critical part of the business.

The project was a huge success and the portal continues to grow and introduce new features for an increasing number of major brands.

If you would like to improve your customer relationships and make large savings on customer service costs then get in touch and we can talk about how Gravitywell can help.

Find out more about Gravitywell's Customer Portals or check out Mezze, our SaaS platform designed specifically for the food industry.