Food.com

New product offerings, performance and scalability enhancements

Food.com is the Internet's premier provider of restaurant takeout and delivery services, powering the online ordering processes for restaurants across the United States. Food.com develops and hosts custom takeout and delivery websites for hundreds of restaurant chains nationwide - some of the notable ones include Papa Johns, Pizza Hut, and Dominos. The company has over 1,500,000 registered members that are able to leverage a network of 400,000 restaurants across the country.

Challenge

Food.com enlisted Übermind to help expand its offerings by implementing "office meals" (functionality that allows offices to order catered meals via the Internet) and "marketplace" (a dynamic web store-front for ordering food-related items from select partners). Additionally, Food.com asked Übermind to help solve a number of different architectural problems, primarily focusing on the scalability and performance of their ordering engine. At the same time, Food.com wanted to improve their ability to implement enhancements and increase the rate of bringing new restaurants online.

  • Sub-second response time for web applications
  • High level of stability, i.e. 24/7 uptime 365 days of the year
  • Scalability; increase the number of orders through system while enhancing customer's user experience
  • Well documented, maintainable codebase
  • Quick turn around time; accelerated time to market

Solution

Übermind brought Food.com's disparate architectures into a single unified architecture. To accomplish this, Übermind implemented a build system that allowed the architecture and applications to be compiled across a number of different platforms. The unified architecture has had a dramatic effect on Food.com's ability to push functional enhancements and new subsystems into production in a very aggressive time frame.

The Übermind team helped port the ordering engine to newer versions of WebObjects and Sybase, rewriting parts of the ordering engine to improve performance and reusability. The improved ordering engine already has ten times the order throughput with the ability to scale even more if required. When Food.com wanted to interface the ordering engine with a J2EE-based content management system, Übermind engineers designed and implemented interfaces that allowed the two systems to seamlessly interact with each other.

Food.com's biggest competitive advantage is their ability to generate a customized ordering engine for a restaurant chain and bring it online in a timely fashion. Übermind helped improve this process by designing and implementing a branding architecture that allows an html developer to quickly generate a customized restaurant ordering web site. The branding architecture was recently used to launch over 100 customized ordering web sites in less than 2 weeks.

Results

  • Faster time to market with new product/service offerings
  • Increased system throughput and scalability
  • Improved efficiency of core business activities