How a seafood procurement platform opened to new verticals and accelerated onboarding in new markets

What was in place

Every food is described in its own way. A fish by its species and size. A yoghurt by its flavour, ten of them sharing everything else. A vegetable by its size grade and its pallet. And a chain buys in one unit and sells to its stores in another. Get one detail wrong and the product cannot be ordered, or traced.

Our founder had built the platform’s whole back-office in Retool, while on its team. It knew fish by heart. To it, ten yoghurts were ten duplicates, and a vegetable’s size grade had nowhere to go.

The objectives

1. Help the customer success team onboard new suppliers in bulk.
2. Open each new vertical as soon as a chain asked for it.
3. Every supplier’s data in the platform’s new standard, so a product means the same thing to everyone who trades it.

What we did

We teamed up with the platform’s customer success team, who onboard the suppliers, and its engineers, who run the platform and its API.

The new standard, in every tool. The platform defined a data standard for the whole industry: 130 columns, and thousands of reference values. We rebuilt its logic across the platform’s custom tools, so every product that comes in follows it.

Batch import and update. A supplier’s whole catalogue loaded in one run, telling a duplicate from a variant. Then prices, labels and other details changed for hundreds of products at once.

Authorisations. Which products each buyer may order, set for many products and many buyers at once: what a chain and its stores need.

The result

Two supermarket chains opened new verticals on the platform: one in Switzerland, one distributing across the whole of Spain. Customer success brought their suppliers on board in bulk, through a back-office that now handles more than 80 new product properties. Each product arrives in the platform’s standard, so it can be traced from the supplier to the store.