Seven years and three products for a doorstep grocery group

We have been this client’s product engineering team since October 2019, which makes it our longest unbroken engagement.

It runs on three fronts. The platform workstream owns the API the business runs on, both generations of the internal operations control room, the transactional database and seventeen supporting services. The web workstream owns the customer-facing storefront for both markets. The mobile workstream owns the customer app, shipping two national app businesses from a single codebase.

Different teams, different date ranges, one continuous relationship.

From one PHP site to thirty services

Fresh milk and groceries reach thousands of doorsteps before dawn, on recurring schedules, across hubs in two countries. The original single PHP website was adequate for launch and a hard ceiling on growth: scaling was difficult, releasing was risky, operations had no tooling, drivers had no app, and route planning across hundreds of postcodes was far beyond what a website could do.

The constraint was never the code — it was that the deliveries could not stop for a single morning. That ruled out any big-bang migration and shaped the whole architecture. New services stood up alongside the old system and took traffic incrementally.

Today one core platform powers UK and US operations with region-specific configuration for hubs, delivery cadences and local requirements.