Gus Foods

Founded in 2020, Gus Foods transformed offices all around the world into a more enjoyable and productive place to work by giving employees 24/7 access to great food and only a few steps away from their desks. This is carried out through the use of a smart fridge (aka Gus) filled with healthy, tasty, and locally sourced meals, drinks, and snacks, which can be accessed at any time on the office floor.

Challenges for Gus Foods

To further enhance their customer experience, Gus Foods was looking for a native mobile application that would deliver a more interactive and lasting experience to their customers. The functionality of the application would be focused on not only on-boarding their clients into the product and interacting with the fridge, but also moving the client away from the fridge, while still retaining a lot of the same capabilities as before. Because they knew of our previous experience with mobile application development and IoT (Internet of Things) , Gus Foods met with Cyrex to see if they could help resolve this issue. Our team was more than happy to take on this new and exciting project.

After extensive research and meeting with the Gus Foods team, Cyrex was able to begin work on this IoT project, with the creation of a mobile application to connect to Gus Foods’ smart fridge via iOS and Android. The mobile application aims to deliver a more interactive and lasting experience to Gus Foods’ customers.

Solution

Before developing this mobile application, Our team proposed its “API Lifecycle Fast-Track”, which is an offering that is strictly focused on identifying and resolving SaaS-specific challenges, which is a natural fit with Gus Foods. Since this last-mile package is intended to bring SaaS providers closer to API Suite, it is combined with a commercial offer that will directly benefit Gus Foods’ goals.

This approach has three main goals. An evaluation of the current state comes first, with an in-depth audit of the current API’s and preferred methods already in place. Second, our team tailors an API guide (documentation) to present a balance between current preferences and industry best practices. Cyrex helps implement the guide with the validation of the updated API contracts and testing the security of the implemented changes.

Lastly, Our team made it easier to test and monitor the new standards, and, of course, connect to the API Suite. With work sessions, business suggestions, and reserved time for post-delivery assistance, our team was able to ensure positive long-term effects for Gus Foods.

Challenges Faced

The biggest challenge the Cyrex team faced was coordinating the implementation with two other different teams: the hardware team and the API team. Besides that, the project itself had an inherent complexity as all of the actual physical fridges were scattered across Belgium.

The hardware team, together with Gus Foods, were kind enough to ship us a test lock so we could do our own tests on premise. However, scaling from a test fridge into a production mode with several fridges scattered across a country definitely brought us a lot of leg work and preparation!

After the first version was a success without any issues, Cyrex was able to expand the project scope and make sure that scaling up to multiple fridges was a seamless next step.

Misc

• Stack: Flutter, Golang, Firebase, MQTT
• Team: Variable between 4 people
• Duration: 3 months

Result

We were thrilled to help Gus Foods further enhance their customer experience and delighted with their feedback:

“We built a native app that allows transactions with multiple payment methods for our food & beverage retail company. Cyrex built the front-end and was in charge of integrating APIs with the back-end and hardware side. Since this was a from-scratch project they took us through UX and design as well as functionalities. They went above and beyond to make us feel comfortable along the way, with the end result being a fully functional app that we can build on as we grow. Special thanks goes out to our point of contact Rui and his team of talented developers. It wasn’t always easy to combine our operational business with sprints and testing, but they pulled us through.”

– Gus Foods Team