Pioneering the Future of B2B E-commerce: Dawn Foods’ Transformation Journey
How the century-old distributor and manufacturer embraced digital commerce in their B2B operations.
Dawn Foods—the B2B mainstay started in Jackson, MI—has spent a century at the forefront of their industry. Evolving from a local bakery into a leading distributor and manufacturer of baking ingredients, they thrived with the kind of direct, personal interactions that have always served the B2B industry well. But Dawn Foods has always had a knack for seeing what’s coming, and with an eye to staying relevant for the next century they recognized the changing tides on the horizon in 2019.
Signs were pointing to an increasing demand from customers for simplified transactions and self-serve purchase options. In short, a preference for digital interactions was growing, and though B2B had been slower to adopt digital commerce than its B2C and D2C counterparts, there was no denying that time was coming— and Dawn Foods needed to be ready.
The Challenge: Modernizing a Legacy Business
“The foundational insight for the company was: customers are asking about self-serve capabilities,” said Gireesh Sahukar, Vice President, Digital at Dawn Foods.
Self-serve is not how most B2B businesses operate, and for Dawn Foods it would mean not only establishing a new sales motion, but an entirely new channel for their business— a digital platform with a first-ever e-commerce experience for their brand. As a net new area, that meant bringing in new experts, including Sahukar and Bob Howland, Dawn Foods’ Chief Digital Officer, to kick-start this significant strategic shift.
For Sahukar, there was one objective from the moment he and Howland started laying out their plans for how to bring e-commerce to their business: modernize customer interactions by making them as seamless and straightforward as possible.
But that’s easier said than done— especially when your business has a set of truly unique challenges and needs. Sahukar knew they would have to stand up a sophisticated, adaptable architecture that could manage the necessary functionalities without disrupting their existing processes, and for that they turned to a composable stack.
In August 2019, they embarked on an expansive tech landscape review, evaluating commerce platforms and speaking to experts in the space and other commerce companies to determine what the best course of action for Dawn Foods would be.
“We asked them what their thesis was of where the market would be in three to five years,” said Sahukar. “Most everyone at the time said, ‘We're making our platform API-first’.”
At the time, all-in-one solutions were the de facto choice for almost any e-commerce effort— the MACH Alliance was still months away from forming and Gartner was still a year away from coining the term composable commerce. But Sahukar and Howland knew they needed a solution that could move with their business over time, and they needed to be sure their investment in building an e-commerce solution today wouldn’t need to be repeated again in the near future.
“The technology companies were telling us that they are moving away from that tightly coupled monolith pattern, and that they're going to separate the frontend from the backend. They're going to provide all the capabilities as APIs and allow you to pick and choose the APIs you need.”
So Sahukar listened, and then the team at Dawn Foods went about building an architecture that allowed them to choose the best solutions for their business needs with the ability to make incremental adjustments over time. They chose composability.
The Strategy: Building a Robust Digital Framework
Dawn Foods had a greenfield opportunity in front of them, with no existing e-commerce infrastructure to dictate the choices they made. Once they’d established an API-first approach was the right one for them, Sahukar built out the architecture, determining what they needed and how they needed it all to fit and work together.
With an architecture set, they had a blueprint to work from for selecting the technologies and vendors for their new e-commerce platform. By letting the architecture be their guide, they were able to select the solutions that fit their customer needs and their operations, minimizing the number of specialized integrations they would need to implement.
When it came time to select their technologies, the process was rigorous. Dawn Foods has specific requirements when it comes to setting up customer accounts—customers are issued a line of credit, so standard checkout processes don’t apply—and handling delivery—they manage last mile delivery in-house, and addresses have to be approved in advance for commercial delivery, to ensure their trucks can navigate to the destination. The solutions they went with had to be able to handle not just any e-commerce use case, but their e-commerce use case.
Vendors were asked to provide real-time demonstrations for use cases Dawn Foods knew were unique to them. This hands-on approach allowed Dawn Foods to see beyond polished demos and understand how these platforms would perform in real-world scenarios. The first selection they made was commercetools as the core platform, chosen for its flexibility and compatibility with other best-in-class solutions. With that key piece in place, the MACH stack started to take shape.
The Solution: Implementing a Composable Commerce Stack
Dawn Foods initially integrated commercetools for their e-commerce platform, Contentstack for content management, and Salsify for product information management. As they progressed, they added Algolia for search capabilities and mabl for automated quality assurance.
A critical aspect of this transition was change management.
“We’ve said this before and will reiterate again, for every hour of development we did to launch the new e-commerce site, we did an hour of change management,” Sahukar said, adding, “If we were to go back and do something differently, we would do two hours of change management for every hour of development.”
Dawn Foods invested heavily in training their sales and customer service teams, ensuring they were comfortable with the new digital tools and could leverage them to enhance customer interactions. This training was concurrent with the platform's development, ensuring that the teams were prepared to use the new system as soon as it went live.
“We said from the very beginning that this solution isn’t here to replace sales,” said Sahukar. “We view our e-commerce solution as a tool, so we’ve always said to the team, ‘This is one more tool you have in your toolbox.’”
The results of that focus on training the team in tandem with developing the platform has been phenomenal.
Outcomes and Next Steps: Leading the Digital Revolution in B2B
The transformation at Dawn Foods has been nothing short of revolutionary. Over 75% of their target audience is now leveraging the new digital platform, a significant achievement in the B2B space where digital adoption is typically low. Dawn Foods has set a new standard in their industry, with competitors now recognizing the value of e-commerce and beginning to follow suit.
Currently, Dawn Foods is focused on refining and optimizing their digital offerings. The next steps involve enhancing the user experience by introducing features like predictive cart capabilities and advanced promotional offerings. The goal is to streamline the shopping process, making it faster and more intuitive for customers, thereby allowing them to focus on other aspects of their business.
“With our customer, we recognize shopping is not their day job. It's one part of their job. They need to get it done quickly and get out,” noted Sahukar. “So now we’re asking ourselves, how do we make that process easier while still allowing opportunities for discovery? How do we introduce new items to you, or new recipes, new techniques? What are the tools that we can give you to grow your business, and in turn grow Dawn's business?”
By continuously innovating and adapting to the needs of their customers, Dawn Foods continues to lead their category— a role they’ll keep filling for the next century.
Leigh Bryant
Editorial Director, Composable.com
Leigh Bryant is a seasoned content and brand strategist with over a decade of experience in digital storytelling. Starting in retail before shifting to the technology space, she has spent the past ten years crafting compelling narratives as a writer, editor, and strategist.