Dawn Foods: What's in your stack?

"I'm Gireesh Sahukar, the VP of Digital at Dawn Foods, a global leader in baking ingredients, manufacturing and distribution. We operate in 110 countries with over 5,000 team members. Our product range includes cake mixes, doughnut mixes, fillings, icing, glazes and other essentials for professional bakers. Dawn Foods has a history spanning over a hundred years, starting as a doughnut shop in 1920 in Jackson, Michigan, where we are still headquartered. My role focuses on managing and improving our B2B e-commerce solution and all customer-facing digital platforms. At Dawn Foods, 'digital' includes e-commerce and our corporate websites, which are available in 19 languages and other supporting platforms. My team's responsibility is to ensure these sites are operational, our e-commerce runs smoothly, and our customers enjoy a fast and responsive experience on all our platforms."

"Between 2017 and 2018, as Dawn Foods approached its 100-year mark, the company began to consider how to conduct business for the next 100 years. Traditionally, sales reps would visit customers, review inventory and take orders for the following week. This process involved a physical exchange and delivery of orders. However, in 2018, recognizing the need for change for the forthcoming century, Dawn Foods sought feedback from customers. They expressed a desire for more self-service options, allowing them to conduct business at their convenience, not just when a sales rep visited. This was particularly important considering the mismatched working hours of bakers and sales reps. To address this, Dawn Foods, lacking the necessary in-house skills for digital transformation, appointed a Chief Digital Officer, Bob Holland. I was recruited by him in 2019 to launch our e-commerce initiative."

"When I joined Dawn, I evaluated the e-commerce space for a modern B2B solution. With experience in e-commerce, I was interested in the evolution of technologies, especially with the rise of cloud computing and API-driven websites. We explored various e-commerce platforms, focusing on their adaptability to APIs, as we aimed for an API-driven website. This led to an architecture plan integrating e-commerce entities with our existing systems through APIs. Ultimately, this approach guided our choice of platform vendor and the selection of Contentstack as our content management system, aligning with our architectural vision."

"When we launched e-commerce in 2020, we chose specific technologies like e-commerce tools and Contentstack. We involved an internal expert managing our corporate websites using a different content management system. Impressed with Contentstack's demo, they suggested migrating our corporate sites to it. Initially hesitant, we reconsidered after recognizing the inefficiencies of our legacy system, which complicated managing our 20 corporate sites and required extensive time and external assistance for content publishing. Contentstack's ease of use for business users, allowing quick and straightforward content publication, showed immediate value. Eventually, this led to a project to migrate all 20 corporate sites onto Contentstack."

"We've automated content publishing using Contentstack Automation Hub, which sends new or updated content to our Algolia search engine for immediate indexing. This greatly enhances publication speed, allowing our marketing teams, content authors and publishers more time for thoughtful, creative work. They can focus on better designs and in-depth research without rushing. This flexibility has also improved translation timelines and user engagement, which is evident in the significant traffic increase. Over 20% since the migration. Our team doesn't require developer skills for content publishing; they focus on their core marketing skills, creating engaging content without worrying about the technical aspects. This independence in content creation and publishing, without developer intervention, is central to our approach, ensuring our content is live and responsive without disrupting our production site.

"My digital team operates independently of both IT and the business, serving as a third component alongside them. We manage some technology directly and collaborate with the business on their initiatives, consulting on various projects within the company, whether they are technology-related or not. This independence allows us to engage differently across the enterprise, providing expertise to various departments and business units and enhancing Dawn's global digital capabilities. Our approach involves owning product engineering operations and running the business aspects.

Digital transformation can be approached in different ways, focusing on improving customer experience and internal efficiencies or combining both. It's possible to progress in a stepwise manner, focusing on one aspect before the other or simultaneously. Our strategy includes establishing a new digital team to spearhead significant transformation efforts and then integrating these new processes, tools and methodologies back into the organization to optimize internal efficiencies across departments and business processes."

"Where you have to keep your ear to the ground is when you're looking at very specific types of platforms you're interested in, like e-commerce or content management.

You have to go to more industry-specific events, build your network in those groups, and, over time, learn what's happening and what's new. It would help if you got in front of analysts, talked to them, and got their insights on what's happening. So you can read all the trade publications. Many of them do an excellent job of pointing out where new emerging trends are, what's rising, what's falling, etc. So, there are multiple different ways in which you can keep up."

"We're consolidating our technology stack to provide a single pane of glass for our customers and internal users. So expanding that single pane of glass, providing more capabilities, role-based access if you will, behind the scenes of, you know, if you are a sales rep, this is what you get access to, you can see your customers, you can see your customer performance, you can you know, co-browse as your customer.

And then, if you are a customer, give them the best-in-class tools to shop online, be reminded, get inspiration ideas, get recipes from us, buy the products required for those recipes, etc. And then, if you are a business leader, you want to see how your business operations are going, providing them the tooling and the dashboards internally in that same platform, one UI, one experience that you know delivers different capabilities based on who has access."