How Dawn Foods revamped its eCommerce site using digital transformation

Snack Food & Wholesale Bakery was recently able to talk to Gireesh Sahukar, vice president of digital, Dawn Foods, Jackson, MI, about Dawn's new eCommerce site.

Liz Parker: How did Dawn Foods undergo a digital transformation for its eCommerce site?

Gireesh Sahukar: At Dawn, being a good partner to our customers is at the forefront of everything we do. With that, we started with considering how to approach our new eCommerce solution given a few important observations. Those were:

1. Bakers are incredibly busy and engage in physically demanding work for long hours. Available 24/7, bakers needed an eCommerce solution that will help them save time and simplify their lives.
2. The digital landscape is moving more towards APIs, and thus, we needed adopt an API-led architecture in line with the ecosystem. This would enable Dawn Foods to be more in control of our own roadmap.
3. With eCommerce, our sales reps can have time back to focus on what matters most: building connections with customers.

With those things in mind, we made the decision to build our own front-end and ensure it could work seamlessly with the back-end tools in our stack. This is reflective of a growing number of companies that are leveraging API-led tools to build a composable architecture of best-fit solutions. This type of plug-and-play solution is enabled by the rise of MACH principles (Microservices, API-first, Cloud-native, Headless) in software design.

To break it down a bit, this approach entails working with smaller solutions that seamlessly integrate with one another. They work together and function as a single unit, yet each part is interchangeable. That makes it easy to replace something if, for example, requirements have changed or a component isn't performing.

Having a MACH architecture enabled us to go from a two-person project team at the beginning of January 2020 to a fully launched eCommerce solution by July 2020.

Read the full article here.