How Wild Fork Foods was able to dish up a digital transformation journey to composable commerce

Wild Fork Foods faced a complex recipe for digital transformation as it aimed to offer a hyper-personalized customer experience across its rapidly growing online and physical presence. Its existing systems lacked the agility needed to keep up with market demands, leading to a disjointed customer journey. 

One of the primary issues was managing the variable weight of food items, which led to potential revenue losses and operational inefficiencies. The extensive product catalog also created complexities in product navigation, inventory management and overall customer experience. Additionally, the current setup was a mix of outdated technologies, complicating the synchronization between online and offline channels.

With the ambition to expand into new markets, Wild Fork Foods needed a platform that could handle substantial growth while providing seamless integration with various technologies. The existing eCommerce platform had compatibility issues with integrating internal systems and the ERP, hindering efficient data flow, communication and business process optimization. These challenges necessitated a comprehensive solution that could address the specific needs of Wild Fork Foods and support its growth ambitions.

To bring home the bacon, Wild Fork Foods chose commercetools for its API-first approach, offering the flexibility and scalability needed to better serve customers. This migration from Shopify to commercetools was facilitated by Aries Solutions, in collaboration with the commercetools Customer Success Engineering team. The MACH® architecture of commercetools allowed Wild Fork Foods to implement dynamic pricing and inventory management systems that could accurately handle variable weight products, greatly minimizing revenue loss and operational inefficiencies. This was something that the previous Shopify platform couldn't handle and served as the company's impetus to migrate in the first place.

The transition involved harmonizing Wild Fork Foods' tech stack, moving from a fragmented system to a streamlined setup with commercetools Composable Commerce at its core. By leveraging best-in-class tools like Dynamic Yield for personalization and integrating with partners such as Algolia and Contentful, the company created a bespoke digital experience. The flexibility of a headless commerce approach enabled Wild Fork to decouple its frontend presentation layer from backend commerce functionality, allowing for more efficient product navigation and management, streamlining inventory processes and enhancing the overall customer experience.

Embracing cloud-native technologies facilitated seamless integration with internal systems and the SAP ERP, ensuring efficient data flow and communication, optimizing business processes and improving decision-making capabilities. The initial rollout began in Canada, a smaller market with no physical store footprint and OMS, allowing Wild Fork Foods to establish a solid foundation. The Canadian go-live was completed nine months after signing, followed by the US market rollout eight months later, with plans for a Mexico rollout next.

This migration enabled Wild Fork Foods to swiftly implement features such as advanced promotions and custom views, ensuring a consistent and rich customer experience across all touchpoints.

The staggered migration to commercetools across two markets was a resounding success, with sights set on additional markets in the coming months. The dynamic pricing and inventory management systems tackled the variable weight issue, and the headless commerce approach enabled more efficient product navigation and management, which significantly improved the customer shopping experience. The composable commerce system allowed the company to easily pivot, add new channels, and improve long-term TCO and ROI, which was especially beneficial during peak business months when 40% of the company's sales occurred.

The impact of these improvements was immediately apparent. On the first day of the new eCommerce launch in Canada, Wild Fork saw a 58% increase in daily orders, a 73% increase in daily new customers and a tripling of daily website visits. These impressive results underscored the effectiveness of the migration to commercetools and set the stage for continued growth and success in other markets like Mexico.

The new platform also allowed the company to achieve faster load times, improve conversion rates and maintain a high Net Promoter Score (NPS). Notably, the Canada launch saw record-breaking orders and customer engagement, highlighting the platform's effectiveness. This digital transformation empowered Wild Fork Foods to serve up a superior, personalized shopping experience, aligning perfectly with its mission to make high-quality protein accessible to all.