Food Express Goes All-In with Seed to Optimize its Business

Food Express

Food Express sees meaningful increases in fill and collection quantities just weeks after Seed implementation.

While Food Express rapidly grew over 2.7 decades, they started to experience critical challenges in managing multiple branches under one streamlined set of processes. Each branch had a different process for managing inventory, scheduling routes, and reporting. Food Express needed greater visibility, productivity, and efficiency across all sites.

The Situation

In business, one of the most important factors for success is scale. While growing quickly increases revenue and profit, it can also result in a hodgepodge of processes across branches of your business. This is what Food Express experienced as one of America’s fastest growing food service companies in the Southeast.

Like many vending operators, Food Express is family-owned. It was founded in 1985 and has successfully expanded in the Southeast United
States —with headquarters in Greensboro, North Carolina and 4 branches in Raleigh, Charlotte, Spartanburg, and Atlanta, GA. Food Express is also a USConnect® affiliate, which allows them to support thousands of clients with their fresh food vending machines, Bistro to GO!® Markets, customized dining, and office coffee services.

The Solution

Food Express elected the Seed Pro and Seed Office platforms, with
added features to support their deliveries, merchandising, and micro markets. The all-inclusive platform offers one centralized view for managing all lines of business across multiple branches, helping operators like Food Express scale more efficiently.

  • One view reporting for all branches.
  • Eliminated hours of manual work downloading, manipulating
  • data and consolidating it into one report.
  • Simple processes that drive accountability.
  • Schedulers are scheduling an entire branch in 15 minutes.
  • They also improved cross-branch alignment on standard processes.
  • Accurate data our team can trust.
  • Moved to dynamic scheduling, which significantly reduced bring-backs.
  • They are now servicing accounts when they need it.
  • Inventory management improvements in the field.
  • Our team can force inventories, and the drivers like the easy-to-use
  • Seed Mobile app forin-field management.
Bistro To Go

The Results

Food Express’s leadership team only had one hesitation about the transition to Seed. Would their employees respond well to the change? As good leaders, they were concerned about the workload of the transition and how it would affect employee morale. Cantaloupe quickly addressed these concerns by training Food Express’s employees on how Seed would make their lives easier. With a greater understanding of Seed, the team’s hesitations were eased, and the employee feedback was overwhelmingly positive.

Cantaloupe completed implementation in record time because Food Express didn’t have to switch out any devices in the field to implement Seed. The Seed suite works with nearly all devices leveraging Seed Sync to seamlessly integrate into their VMS. Cantaloupe’s implementation team provided project planning with daily communication, onboarding, and on-site training to ensure implementation was successful at multiple branches.

For more information visit https://www.cantaloupe.com/.