Cantaloupe Inc. a digital payments and unattended retail software services company, reported that Greensboro, NC-based Food Express has deployed Cantaloupe's Seed Pro and Seed Office platforms with added features to support deliveries, merchandising and micro market operations.
Under an agreement with Cantaloupe, Food Express is using the Seed platforms to manage all lines of business across multiple branches.
Founded in 1985, family-owned Food Express is one of the Southeast's fast-growing foodservice companies. It has branches in branches in Raleigh, Charlotte, Spartanburg and Atlanta. It is also a USConnect affiliate.
“Like many businesses that grow quickly, we started to experience critical challenges in managing multiple branches under one streamlined set of processes. We were also concerned about how the workload of transitioning to a new solution would affect employee morale,” said Food Express president Hugh O’Neill.
“We found Cantaloupe to be the perfect partner as it quickly addressed these concerns by demonstrating to our employees how Seed would make their lives easier," O'Neill continued, "Implementation was completed in record time as the Seed platform integrated seamlessly into our VMS, and daily communication supported the project plan and key next steps for onsite teams at multiple branches. We immediately saw positive results and couldn’t be happier.”
O'Neill reported the following benefits:
- Elimination of manual work hours for downloading, manipulating data and consolidating it into one report.
- Alignment of standard processes across all branches.
- Generation of more accurate data through dynamic scheduling, which reduces bring-backs and allows the servicing accounts only when they need it.
- Inventory management improvement, with drivers adopting the Seed Mobile app for in-field management.
As a result, and within just six weeks of implementation, Food Express reported a 30% reduction in vending service visits, a 75% increase in average fills and a 97% lift in average collections per visit.
Cantaloupe published a case study of Food Express's Seed implementation here.
"Now Food Express has the powerful ability to operate their vending, markets, and OCS on the same platform," said Cantaloupe chief executive Sean Feeney.