The Challenge

Having celebrated their 100th anniversary in 2020, Dawn Foods wanted to ensure that they kept flourishing for at least 100 more. However, with little digital presence to speak of, they needed to make some changes. In an economy where the digital landscape is as dynamic as it is integral to growth, they needed to shift away from their purely sales rep-driven practice to launching an entire eCommerce site from scratch. This included completely redesigning their digital architecture from the ground up. For a bit of extra challenge, they set themselves a time frame of just six months.

MACH Approach

The newly installed Digital Team started by drawing up the kind of architecture that would launch their eCommerce presence and futureproof them for years to come. Having done their research and looked at the more monolithic solutions out there, they saw that a modular architecture would work best for them. In fact, they found that many of the larger providers were themselves leveraging MACH principles internally.

When looking to launch their eCommerce site and set themselves up for the future, they were convinced by an API-driven, microservice-based approach to sourcing vendors. The freedom and flexibility afforded by a MACH Architecture means that each arm of their business could address their immediate and future concerns in a way that best suited them, without compromising with other departments.

The Dawn Foods Digital Team had a tight deadline of just 22 weeks to implement an entirely new architecture and launch its eCommerce presence. They achieved this in no small part due to the maturity and fast pace MACH architecture allows. The dynamism of MACH meant that their small team was able to build a robust application architecture that traditionally would take years to achieve. Not only were they able to launch their eCommerce platform within 6 months, they were able to grow from a 2-person project team to a group of 18.

By being able to switch platforms and vendors seamlessly behind the scenes with no impact on the front end, Dawn Foods established an architecture that gave their new eCommerce site its best customer experience. They went for a single-page web application on the front end, a microservices-based back end, and an orchestration layer in between to stitch together the responses between APIs. Now able to replace APIs without having to re-platform, their digital presence is futureproofed against any major re-haul as the underlying API structures remain the same - all while presenting a unified view to the front end.

The MACH approach hasn’t just set the company up for future business development, it’s improved relationships and sales with existing customers. With customers now having 24/7 digital access to goods, they can explore more than 10,000 items at their leisure. Customers of over 25 years have bought products from the website that they’d been buying elsewhere simply because they weren’t aware Dawn Foods stocked them – what a way to passively upsell.

For more information click here.