Working at Dawn Foods: Boston Digital Innovation Hub

Keith Cline, VentureFizz 

Bob, thanks so much for joining us

Bob Howland, Dawn Foods

Great to be here. Thanks, Keith.

Keith Cline, VentureFizz   

So we're gonna talk about Dawn Foods, and specifically the Boston Digital Innovation Hub, which we had a conversation about a year ago, which we kind of got a lot of the foundational information. So if you're interested in hearing more about Bob's background, check out the first version of this video that we did. This is a video that we're talking about current current events of what's been happening over the past year, which is a lot. So that's why we're kind of revisiting this. But I do think it's still important to talk about Dawn Foods as a company, just in case, this is, you know, the first time someone's been introduced to Dawn Foods. So talk about what the company does.

Bob Howland, Dawn Foods 

Surem I mean, a lot of people like myself, before I was recruited into the role, I never heard of Dawn Foods. But trust me if you had a doughnut or a bakery, good, you, you've tasted Dawn Foods. So we manufacture and we distribute bakery ingredients to fast food chains, supermarkets, and our bread and butter is the local artisanal bakery.

Keith Cline, VentureFizz 

You know, we're recording this in the middle of the pandemic, which is absolutely crazy. But it's those small business owners, the bakeries that are you know, the ones that are powering the economy and need to be supported. So I think it speaks volumes of what what you guys are doing and how that plays into what we're all experiencing. So talk about the desire to build out this innovation hub initially, and what you guys have been working on.

Bob Howland, Dawn Foods

It's been a great year, I mean, it's a stranger for all of us, for sure. But we set out, you know, two very ambitious goals for 2020. And the two goals were to build out a digital innovation hub in Boston. And the second goal was to launch the first ever e-commerce website, a B2B website within the bakery industry, with a focus again, on that local independent Baker. And I'm proud to say that we hit both targets in a way that is very remarkable.

Keith Cline, VentureFizz  

And because this is an industry that's just ripe for digital transformation, like there's a lot of processes that we're still, you know, it could even be like facts based or, you know, so, so what, how has this all transformed based on what you guys just, you know, launched recently?

Bob Howland, Dawn Foods

It's definitely it's definitely an old school industry, right? I mean, many of our core customers are multi generational, small business owners, and they get up at the crack of dawn, they get to their shop, their store their retail outlet. And they, you know, they make donuts, right? It's the old cliche. And for us to bring a digital solution to them at the time of COVID was just right place at the right time, right, we didn't alter our plans, it was kind of lucky that we were planning to do this. But at the end of the day, our paradigm shift that we're after is, we don't want the salesperson to go in there every week and take the order. And that that's a very expensive, it's a waste of time, in many ways, because you've got a lot of drive time back and forth. And frankly, you're interrupting the baker, right, when they've got their hands in their dough. And they're, they're creating their craft. And so the idea to allow a baker to order all the ingredients that they need, from Dawn Foods, whenever they want, however they want. And to have that choice, they could certainly do it while they're in their shop, they could certainly do it, you know, during downtime, they could do it at home before they leave, they could do it at home when they come back. But that convenience factor, we found that we really struck a chord. And I know that technology is, ans especially new technology is hard for some people. But we've got a great response from the marketplace. And for those that the most common quote I hear from the customer is Thank you, Dawn. And what they're saying is, you know, thank you for giving me something that really helps me grow my business and puts me in control of the dynamic. I don't have to wait for my salesperson to show up anymore. I can do this whenever I want. Which ultimately, that's the kind of experience we all want to enable for customers.

Keith Cline, VentureFizz 

Yeah, I mean, it's that that's experience for every industry. And it's good that this industry is finally getting up to speed on it. So what's, like, looking ahead, you know, what types of initiatives Do you see for coming? You know, in the future?

Bob Howland, Dawn Foods 

Yeah, for us, we were 100 year old company, and we don't have much in the way of digital enablement. You know, think about pricing supply chain, we didn't have a product catalog, right. And so these are all things that the company with our help and our support, you know, we all partner together, and we created a business that could be digitally enabled. And we're at the very, very beginning of the journey. You know, I think about this as the first inning of a nine inning baseball game. You know, we have an online ordering site. It works great. And in the future for us the next steps in 2021 and frankly beyond are many right we have to win the head in the heart of the salespeople. Because at the end of the day, we don't go directly to the customer, we go through a salesperson. So the customer finds out about their website from their salesperson. Right? So we want to make sure that the salespeople really understand the possibilities of online and e-commerce. And we also have to create customer service. It's a whole different way of servicing customers than having them call a local distribution center. Right? If I'm on the East Coast, if I'm in Boston, and it's nine o'clock at night, and I've got a question, because I'm on my, my online platform, I should be able to call, text, chat, with somebody. And today, we're not built to do that. Right? Our product catalog is amazing. We have images and content for thousands and thousands, of skews that's in our warehouse. And we also don't have images and content for many, many hundreds of skews, that's in our warehouse. So as a business, we have to think about, is it do we want 100% of the catalog to be online, even even those items that sell you know, one or two times a year. And so we're going through that evolutionary process as a business. At the same time, we're trying to build out that next big feature that next big, you know, customer experience on the on the platform itself. And so a lot of exciting things, great start and many, many innings ahead of us.

Keith Cline, VentureFizz 

So Bob talked about, like the overall tech trends and you know, platforms within e-commerce and how Dawn Foodsis approaching this problem?

Bob Howland, Dawn Foods 

Yeah, I think you know, Gartner and many of the analysts are saying that this concept of composable commerce or composable architecture is one of the biggest trends for 2021. And going forward, is frankly, now the term I had heard last year. But lo and behold, when dawn foods went about thinking it's about e-commerce platform, that's exactly what we did, we could have gone out to a big bundle shop. And we all know the names of those companies that are for many people, you know, a perfect fit. We thought that for Dawn Foods, we want a couple of things we want to control. We didn't want to lock into the technology that was going to be David. And frankly, we want short term contracts. So I wanted this series of one year contracts with people. And so we really fell into this concept of a headless backend platform, a CMS on the front end, and then figuring out what the other pieces the modules would be to make it microservices, API first, cloud based, and then headless. And I'm very proud to say that we were one of the first B2B companies in the United States. That's built their entire ecommerce platform using this now, Gartner coined topic, headless, and composable commerce.

Keith Cline, VentureFizz   

So what's the current size of the Boston Digital Innovation Hub? And what types of roles are there?

Bob Howland, Dawn Foods

Yeah, great question. So we hired our we hired our lead technical person in 2019. And together, Gireesh and I built out a team that now includes 15 people in Boston. And we certainly have a development stack. So we've got software engineers that write the code. We also have a product management team. These are the folks that really go out, talk to customers, talk to sales people, and think about what features are going to be important to drive site behavior, and ultimately sales. And they they're responsible for the product roadmap. We also have a team of merchandisers hiring a bunch of people from wayfair, we've got some great merchandisers that are really thinking about the site experience, really looking at analytics. And then with any traditional digital stack, you need to have the operations folks. So you know, the Site Reliability engineers, the tech ops people, right. And so we've got that core team as well. And so all told, we've got 15 people, all of them were hired in 2020, we actually have an outstanding role now for a project management person. And then 2021, we'll look to build out both the product management team as well as the tech ops team, to more to make them more robust group. We operate in an agile environment, we do two week sprints, we release functionality every two weeks. And the process of integrating that with the dawn business is really, really important. Because as you can imagine, 100 year old company doesn't work on two weeks sprint cycles, and our sales team, digital is very new to them. And so throwing things at them every two weeks is frankly a lot. And so we're trying to really hone in on what that process is that communication process internally. And we're also trying to really, really focus on Customer Experience, which is just a lot of fun for such a Greenfield opportunity is this.

Keith Cline, VentureFizz 

So what's the culture like working at the the Innovation Hub, and you mentioned, you know, you've hired a bunch of people yet, it's in a very weird world of 2020, where, you know, people are being hired remotely.

Bob Howland, Dawn Foods

Yeah, I think people are very fortunate that are on the team, I think we all feel like in many, many ways, we all feel very blessed. It's a, it's a unique opportunity for a digital or technology person. This is, on the one hand, you've got this big company, this global leader, and North America is where we make most of our money. So it's where most of our focus is. and digital is really the legacy of the organization going forward. So we're blessed to have this company that really stands behind it, from the CEO to the board to everybody else on the exec team all the way down. On the other hand, everybody in the Boston team, you know, did not work at Dawn 12 months ago, right? So we've got a team that's come together, they are they are deciding for themselves, how do we want to work? What tools do we want to work with? And importantly, how are we going to build this ecommerce platform, right, we built this from scratch ourselves this year, right? There was not a single piece of code that was written in 2019. This was all done in 2020. And so for a digital, you know, subject matter expert to be able to decide what platform you're going to build, how you're going to build it, what communication and collaboration tools you're going to work with, and how you're going to work with each other. For many people, that's just a once in a lifetime opportunity. If you want to be one of 100, or one of you know, 300 developers, this is probably not the environment for you. But if you want to have an impact every day, every week on what you do, and how you do it, and the people around you, and our customer, then this is a great opportunity.

Keith Cline, VentureFizz  

Yeah, it's a great opportunity to join a company that has that rich foundation. You know, it's 100 year old company, so it just has a history. yet, this team is so entrepreneurial, and more like operating like a startup and building this whole digital transformation, which is just a great, great opportunity. Well, if you are interested in exploring opportunities at Dawn Foods and their Boston office, you can check out all their job listings on VentureFizz, go to venturefizz.com/dawn-foods, and you'll see all their listings there. Bob thanks for taking the time to bring our audience up to speed.

Bob Howland, Dawn Foods

Great Keith, enjoyed it as always.