Supplier Compliance System
Overcome a key obstacle to reaching scale
Project Overview
Managing a the food supply chain at scale is a huge task. Because their commitment to allowing store managers to source products locally Whole Foods Market had 10,000+ suppliers and 400,000+ unique products they sold across their 445 stores nationwide.
Background
Companies like Whole Foods Market used FoodLogiq so suppliers could complete most tasks related to their products.
Suppliers weren’t completing required tasks. Whole Foods staff began filling gaps, quickly becoming overwhelmed. FoodLogiq then stepped in manually, creating further strain.
Manual work was unsustainable and became a critical barrier to scaling.
Key Challenge
The prevailing belief was that the notification system worked fine and suppliers simply didn’t care enough to complete their tasks.
This assumption didn’t sit right with me, suppliers were motivated to get their products into Whole Foods, and non-compliance put that at risk.
Because suppliers weren’t paying customers, we hadn’t engaged deeply enough to understand their needs or pain points.
The first step was to better understand suppliers’ experiences with the system and identify barriers to compliance.
Opportunity
If we could make our suppliers self-sufficient on the platform, the product could fully live up to our promises and unlock the ability to scale.
Timeline
3-4 months from generative research to final designs.
Process Step 1
Onsite Research and Interviews
We visited several suppliers to see our platform in action, but Slingshot Coffee in Raleigh, NC stood out. The founder, just starting out yet clearly aiming big, had gone all in—and landing Whole Foods as a customer was a huge milestone. She agreed to walk through the onboarding process while we observed. Confident in her tech skills, she expected to complete it quickly.
Findings
The founder quickly became confused and frustrated, fearing mistakes would make Whole Foods see her as inexperienced and jeopardize her hard-won opportunity. We guided her through onboarding and assured her that her feedback would improve the system.
“I don’t know what I am being asked to do”
Process Step 2
System Design
The root issue lay in the tools we gave customers to specify compliance requirements—driving major changes for both suppliers and customers. Because food safety allows no room for error, we invested heavily in meticulous planning to ensure a seamless migration.
Solution
Suppliers should only see requirements relevant to their products.
To achieve this, we built a Requirement Trigger engine that dynamically generates tasks based on supplier input. For example, selecting “Yes, the product is Organic” automatically creates a task to upload an Organic Certification which isn't seen by non-organic suppliers.
We need to keep suppliers from getting lost or feeling helpless on the platform.
In the old system, suppliers had to navigate multiple tabs and often got lost. We replaced this with a modal-based flow that let them complete everything within the task dashboard—and added an integrated chat for instant help if they got stuck.
Clearly communicate to users when they are done.
Instead of notifying suppliers when ever something became available for completion we created a To-Do digest that was sent once a week.
Results
Increased Engagement
In the first year suppliers completed over 500k to-dos. 88% to-dos were completed without becoming overdue,