Supplier portal for a foodtech marketplace

The client is a UK foodtech marketplace connecting suppliers with buyers, where operational efficiency on both sides drives the economics. Suppliers managing listings and orders manually created friction and cost that scaled badly with growth.

A previous portal attempt had failed to gain traction, so the team was rightly wary of a second effort that might meet the same fate.

Suppliers still managed listings and orders by email and spreadsheet, creating manual work and errors on both sides of the marketplace. The overhead grew with every new supplier, dragging on the marketplace's ability to scale.

An earlier portal attempt had been abandoned as too slow, so suppliers were sceptical of a second try. Winning them back meant the new tool had to be visibly better, not just newer.

The marketplace needed genuine adoption, not just a portal that technically existed but nobody used. Success would be measured in behaviour change, not in a launch announcement.

We designed the portal around the supplier's real listing-and-fulfilment journey rather than the marketplace's internal data model. Building it around the user's actual workflow is what made it worth adopting.

Performance was treated as a feature: the earlier failure taught us that a slow tool simply gets abandoned, so speed was engineered in from the start. We instrumented every step so friction showed up in the data, then closed the drop-off points one by one.

A staged rollout let us prove value with a first cohort before pushing for wider adoption, so momentum built on evidence rather than mandate. Each wave of suppliers joined a tool that was already demonstrably working.