Dot Foods simplifies with a customer-centric digital strategy

Pioneers with big dreams of streamlining the food supply chain

In 1960, Robert and Dorothy Tracy founded Associated Dairy Products Company (now Dot Foods) out of the back of their family’s station wagon. They dreamed of giving customers access to affordable products and helping food industry suppliers increase their sales.

60 years and three generations of Tracy family leaders later, Dot Foods has transformed the food industry and is the largest food industry redistribution company in North America.

Dot Foods owes its success to their business model, shared values, the talents of 6,400 employees and the Tracy family’s leadership. Dot Foods is considered a B2B food service leader and serves as a much-needed “buy by the truck-load” food-supply partner sitting in between food manufacturers like P&G, Kellogg’s, General Mills, etc. and consumer channels.

Today, Dot Foods makes more products accessible to more people than ever before and is hyper-focused on driving growth. To differentiate, Dot Foods looked to embark on a digital transformation journey and own their entire distribution network. Dot Foods partnered with Optimizely and Valtech to engineer new experiences for the end-user that would change the way the promise of shared growth was delivered to their customers.

From simple transactions to customer-centric experiences

Dot Foods’ initial ecommerce portal was a simple transactional site. Dot Foods knew that in order to transform, they had to change their focus to putting the customer at the center of the experience. Dot Foods wanted to serve their customers in more meaningful ways online by being more transparent, proactive and anticipating their needs. Ultimately, Dot Foods strived to deliver an ecommerce experience that went beyond transactions and served as a trusted companion to their customers.

Migrating to Optimizely enabled Dot Foods to take advantage of the benefits of a leading digital experience platform and swiftly respond to evolving customer expectations. They are now able to activate all moments across the customer journey. Plus, they can move extremely quickly as evidenced by their ability to deploy a COVID-19 microsite featuring alternative, high-demand COVID-19 products, in a manner of just two weeks.

The big dreams continue with goals to triple online revenue

This may sound strange coming from a technology provider, but it’s not always enough to just throw technology at a problem. Companies who embark on digital transformation journeys must not be afraid of culture or mindset shifts. Dot Foods created a company-wide mindset around ecommerce to rally around goals including:

• Introduce an intuitive, contextual and inspiring ecommerce experience
• Bring all channels together in one digital interface
• Deliver shared growth to customers
• Increase online sales from $1 billion to $3 billion

"I am extremely proud that we could generate the kind of business lift we did for Dot Foods with the COVID-19 microsite built on Optimizely, in a matter of just two weeks."

Casper Aagaard Rasmussen

Group SVP, Technology, Valtech

Delivering the Dot Foods brand promises through digital

To bring their business to new heights in the digital world, Dot Foods relied on Optimizely and Valtech. As a result of the transformation, Dot Foods has a solution that puts the customer at the center of the experience. With ecommerce, Dot Foods is uncovering operational efficiency, increasing overall customer satisfaction, driving conversions and personalizing the experience.

To personalize the experience for customers, Dot Foods elevates relevant products and merchandise, offers product recommendations, fine-tunes search and continues to enhance the customer experiences with Optimizely.

The Dot Foods digital transformation demonstrates that even the most complex, sophisticated challenges can be made simple with Optimizely.

How Dot Foods solves complex business challenges:

• Product Recommendations enable Dot Foods to provide data-driven recommendations for commonly ordered items or seasonality trends
• Dot Foods enables their suppliers to advertise on their site through Optimizely’s search and navigation
• Dot Foods uses personalized search and navigation to curate shortcuts for specific audiences and individuals
• Multi-cart management makes it convenient for customers to make the right buying decisions
• Rich account dashboard allows customers to access order history, frequently ordered products, commonly used brands and real-time notifications