Dawn Foods finds recipe for online success

Before 2019, Dawn Foods handled all their orders in person and by telephone. They wanted to add an online option to give their retail bakery customers access to their extensive product catalog, the ability to order with

one click and a convenient online payment portal. Dawn Foods needed an agile platform that would scale. Looking into solutions, they found that all the viable e-commerce platforms were moving to API-first and microservices architecture.

In addition to a composable, API-first and microservices-centric architecture, Dawn Foods wanted its CMS to be developer-friendly. But ease of use for business users was also a significant factor in their choice. “We wanted a CMS system that is easy for a business user to maintain, update, enhance and manage,” said Gireesh Sahukar, vice president of Digital at Dawn Foods

“Our business users shouldn’t have technical skills to be managing the content. The business user tooling needed to be robust and friendly to such user groups. That is where Contentstack was a better platform than the others that we looked at.”

When it came to implementation, Contentstack’s customer success team was fantastic in helping Dawn Foods get started. Dawn Foods’ team worked collaboratively with Contentstack architects and implementation partner consultants to make sure they had workable solutions that would scale.

“We had an excellent initial working relationship, and it’s only growing stronger,” Sahukar said. “I have worked with content in other systems such as Adobe, Kentico, Sitecore and more. It was pretty painful. To think that my team is managing all the content without needing technical skills whatsoever is astonishing. They can create the content, publish it, review it and make sure it is propagated to different environments across our stack without needing developers or anyone from the operations teams to be involved. That is pretty close to magical.”

An example of the ease of managing content for Dawn Foods was a couple of days after launching the site, the customer service team determined that the sign-up page’s language was not very clear to customers. They asked to change it. Since the page’s content was stored in Contentstack, it was easy to make the changes and publish it, so it was on the live site in minutes.

Contentstack is being used on Dawn Foods’ online order site. “Content updates in our site run 80% faster compared to publishing with a monolith CMS," Sahukar said. "In some cases, the content that could take up to a week to publish using a monolith CMS, we can publish in less than an hour with Contentstack.”

Additionally, due to the system’s composable nature, the velocity of updating the platform has been impressive, with six major releases in six months since the launch of the e-commerce site.

In the article, “Dawn Foods Whips Up a ‘Headless Commerce’ Recipe for Going Digital,” on the Digital Commerce 360 site, Bob Howland, chief digital officer at Dawn Foods Global, said “the capabilities of its new platform and ecosystem proved to be of high value early on.” Within a month after launching its new platform, the team learned more about how customers wanted to use the site, so Howland’s team made more than 40 updates to the customer-facing front-end interface.

Howland also said that since the e-commerce site launch, more than 50% of Dawn’s artisanal bakery customers have registered as online buyers, and nearly all online orders include products that a customer hadn’t ordered before (through offline orders).”

“Every week, we’re seeing registered customers buying the same products, plus one or two new ones,” he adds. “And once a customer places two or three orders online — then they are sold on the online channel, and then only place orders online.”