---
title: "How a seafood procurement platform opened to new verticals and accelerated onboarding in new markets"
metaTitle: "Onboarding 1,000+ suppliers for a fresh food platform"
metaDescription: "We turned a seafood procurement platform's back-office into one for all fresh food: 1,000+ suppliers onboarded, whole catalogues imported in bulk."
who: "Procurement platform for fresh food"
brick: internal-erp
industry: "Fresh food, B2B software"
order: 5
metric: "1,000+ suppliers onboarded"
cardFigure:
  value: "1,000+"
  label: "suppliers onboarded"
teaser: "A procurement platform built on seafood, with 1,000 suppliers on board. Two supermarket chains wanted dairy, meat and vegetables too. We adapted its back-office so customer success could onboard the new suppliers and import and update their catalogues in bulk."
stack: [retool, postgresql, google-sheets]
sectors: ["Food"]
size: startup
types: [internal-erp, automation]
image:
  src: "/assets/work/fresh-food-platform-supplier-onboarding.jpg"
  alt: "Fresh seafood on crushed ice"
  credit: "Mike Bergmann"
  creditUrl: "https://unsplash.com/@michael_lee_"
  source: "https://unsplash.com/photos/tHjXXy1kk_Q"
numbers:
  - value: "1,000+"
    label: "suppliers onboarded"
  - value: "100,000"
    label: "products imported"
  - value: "400,000+"
    label: "transactions in 26 countries"
  - value: "3"
    label: "new verticals"
---

Fresh food spoils, its price moves every day, and every product should be traceable. A seafood procurement platform makes that trade digital. Then two supermarket chains asked for dairy, meat and vegetables, and needed to onboard their suppliers fast.

We turned its seafood back-office into one for all fresh food: customer success now onboards whole catalogues in bulk.

## 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.

## 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.

## 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.

## 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.

---

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