Bilka and føtex offer catering services to their customers for both private and company events. Both chains produce catering products in their butcher and bakery in-store speciality food sections.

Senior Director, Head of store development at Bilka Claus Frederiksen says, “There is a clear megatrend of customers wanting more convenience products, like our catering services. To leverage this trend and to grow, we needed to optimise the sales channel and the production in our catering services.

Before we developed our new catering ecommerce platform together with Sprinting Retail, our customers in most cases had to go and order in our shops. We had some menus in our web-shop, but as catering products are quite complex, we could not present and market the products optimally online.

On top of this, the orders were all paperbased, and the kitchens had to arrange orders according to delivery dates in physical pocket file folders. This was inefficient, as it led to a lack of order overview and to hallenges when it comes to managing ingredient stock-levels”.

An ambitious project plan was set for the new e-commerce and production platform. First release should be launched in only 12 weeks to be ready for sales for St. Martin’s Eve.

Claus Frederiksen explains, “Our digital department recommended us to develop the solution together with Sprinting Retail and use an agile development process. I had not tried agile development before, so I was both sceptical and quite curious.

Since this project, I have worked with other companies delivering agile development, but none does it as well as what I experienced with Sprinting Retail. Adopting the name “sprinting” in Sprinting Retail is a bold move, but I must say that Sprinting Retail lives up to its name”.

Launching the solution this way gave us two important inputs. Firstly, we learned valuable lessons from our customers’ and employees’ use of the solution early. We could see what was useful and what was not, which helped us steer the direction of the solution.

Secondly, it gave us early revenue from the solution that proved to us that we were on the right track business-wise.

Today, the solution has expanded to a comprehensive e-commerce solution that is much more than a web-shop. It is a solution that also supports order management and production in our catering business.

A key aspect of the solution is that we can now launch new products and menus online faster. We can better tailor our menus to specialised and seasonal demands. A part of our success in our catering business comes from the ability to innovate and launch products fast.

Before the project started, Sprinting Retail described the process as launching a scooter and then ending up with a Ferrari. I must say that we indeed succeeded very well doing just that”.

Claus Frederiksen adds, “The solution has given us the infrastructure we needed to experience profitable growth”.

Claus Frederiksen concludes “The solution is an important component in our ability to scale in our catering business. In that aspect, the solution is a contributing factor to the high growth we experience within the sales of our catering products. We are now investing quite a lot, especially in the online marketing of our catering products.

We run campaigns that link to specific pages in the shop part of the solution, which has tremendously driven up sales.

One year after the launch of the solution and us increasing our marketing spending, we have seen a 50% overall growth in our catering business. In 2018 approx. 50% of the sales happened online, so far this year 60% come from online sales. We expect this growth and shift to online to continue.”