Dawn Foods is finding new ways to help its B2B customers stand out among their competition.

Providing bakeries with the right ingredients to make them stand out among their competition is a challenge Dawn Foods has been managing for a long time. But a newly configured B2B ecommerce strategy and technology platform has given the bakery products distributor more helpful ways to serve its customers.

Gireesh Sahukar, vice president of Digital, Dawn Foods

“Our customers are saying, ‘Help me grow my business, help me differentiate from the bakery down the street,” says Gireesh Sahukar, vice president of digital, adding: “What we’ve been doing for the last year or so is thinking through how do we make our ecommerce site more valuable and personalized for each customer?”

Dawn Foods upgrades its ecommerce technology

In the past few years, Dawn has redeveloped its ecommerce platform and content management system, replacing what had been two separate websites for content and ecommerce transactions with a single site capable of presenting far more helpful personalized content and purchasing experiences. Meeting that challenge requires Dawn to address the widely diversified needs of multiple types of bakery companies — including those that specialize in making and marketing cupcakes and pastries, various types of breads, or combinations of both baked product groups.

With its integrated ecommerce and content management technologies — including a Contentstack CMS and Salsify product information management system integrated with a commercetools ecommerce platform — Dawn has developed new ways for customers to discover and purchase new combinations of bakery ingredients and recipes. Dawn’s customers have responded with increased online activity, Sahukar says.

Although the family-owned Dawn Foods doesn’t release comprehensive financial numbers, about 75% or more of its customers have adopted Dawn’s online channel, and online sales have been increasing in triple-digit percentage increases, Sahukar says.

Building on Dawn’s API-based architecture

The distributor’s API-driven architecture in the commercetools platform also plays a key role in providing the customer experience level that hits home with buyers, Sahukar says.

When Dawn replaced its legacy websites, it opened up new windows to give busy bakery customers what they need to maintain a fresh menu of goods enticing to buyers. Many of Dawn’s customers look for and purchase food ingredients in the early-morning hours at the tail end of their overnight baking shifts. Presenting them with helpful web content is crucial for providing the customer experience they need and expect, Sahukar says.

“A high-level example of what we’ve done is we now have recipes that are shoppable,” Sahukar says.

Buyers can browse through new recipes devised by Dawn’s in-house culinary experts and click to purchase items from the list of ingredients.

In a related feature, Dawn’s customers can view its list of available food products and click to view suggested recipes for baked goods. Dawn also features online how-to videos for handling the more complex recipes.

Dawn Foods manufactures and distributes about 10,000 SKUs across the U.S. market. In addition, it has between 600 and 700 attributes per item, including critical data on nutrition, allergens and other food characteristics.

Dawn Foods develops content in minutes instead of weeks

To present all that information accurately and in a helpful and personalized form for customers, Dawn relies on the API-driven and headless architecture of its platform to produce and make live web content features in minutes instead of what could have been weeks under its former technology platform, Sahukar says.

“We can create that content for donuts, cakes, cupcakes, and tag it appropriately,” he says. “And when a user logs in, we recognize them as a donut shop or a cake shop or a cupcake shop. We can then only show them the content that is relevant to their store, their business, giving them a much more targeted experience.

“There’s no point in showing a cake shop all of our donuts. We love donuts; it’s not relevant to them.”

And Dawn continues to work with its technology partners to deploy ongoing improvements. This fall, it expects to access Contentstack’s new content-personalization capabilities and a visual content-building feature that enables content developers and managers to immediately see how new content appears on their websites.

It’s all about keeping up with the customer experience that customers expect — a strategy Dawn works hard to maintain.

“Our customers keep telling us we’ve got a robust voice-of-customer program,” Sahukar says. “And everything we do is based on our customers’ prioritization.”

Paul Demery is a Digital Commerce 360 contributing editor covering B2B digital commerce technology and strategy. [email protected].

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