PFD Food Services
A wholesale food business building its first online store at scale.
PFD has been delivering fresh, frozen and dry goods to Australian businesses since 1864. Restaurants, hospitals, schools, aged care, cafés and hotels. By 2018 they had 55,000+ customer businesses, ordering through systems that weren't built for online trading at scale. Inventory, pricing and customer accounts lived inside a QAD MFG Pro ERP that nothing else could reach.
PFD needed a platform that could carry billions a year in real orders, talk to the systems already running it, and serve two very different customer groups: enterprise B2B procurement and individual operators ordering this week's food.
What was holding the platform back.
No online channel at scale.
55,000+ customer businesses, all transacting through call centres and field reps.
No way to put the catalogue in front of them digitally.
Legacy ERP locked the data away.
Inventory, pricing and customer accounts sat inside QAD MFG Pro.
The shop had to talk to it without duplicating the data.
Two audiences, one app.
Enterprise B2B buyers with procurement systems and contract pricing.
Individual operators ordering tomorrow's deliveries. Same platform, different workflows.
Live food, hard deadlines.
Perishable goods, same-day cut-offs, regional delivery windows.
Downtime or a broken cart costs real orders, not impressions.
A decoupled platform, built to last.
One platform, the full B2B and B2C surface.
Decoupled Laravel and Vue.
Single application, two workflows.
The same codebase serves enterprise B2B and individual operators with different access, pricing and procurement flows.
PFD API and QAD integration.
A Laravel integration layer sits between the shop and PFD's existing API, which fronts the QAD MFG Pro ERP.
Inventory, pricing and orders stay in one source of truth. No duplicate systems to keep in sync.
PunchOut Catalog for enterprise.
Large customers buy from PFD inside their own procurement systems.
Cart contents and contract pricing flow back and forth without leaving the buyer's ERP.
Mobile PWA on iOS.
Progressive Web App published into the Apple App Store.
Customers ordering food on the floor, in the kitchen, on a delivery dock.
AI ingredient suggestions.
Integration with Complexica's Larry API surfaces missing ingredients at checkout based on each customer's menu.
More revenue from carts that already exist.
CDN, caching, security.
CloudFront serves cached marketing pages alongside live cart state. PCI Pal handles payment under PCI compliance. MFA on staff and admin identity.
Enterprise-volume traffic, sensible defaults.
Seven years of features shipped.
Pantry, Favourites, Bought Before.
Custom saved lists with draggable reorder. One-tap reorder from purchase history.
Built for chefs ordering the same things every week, not consumers browsing.
Barcode scanner on mobile.
Mobile barcode scanning that calls the PFD API to find the product and add it to cart.
Stock checked in the storeroom, reorder in the kitchen.
AI product suggestions.
Related products on the PDP. Cheaper alternatives at add-to-cart. Out-of-stock substitutions in the cart. Missing ingredients flagged from each customer's menu.
Four AI surfaces, all powered by Complexica's Larry API.
Order workflows for enterprise.
Edit orders that are still open. Switch profiles between sites you buy for. Authorisation chains for orders that need sign-off before they ship.
The B2B back office, built into the front end.
Three payment gateways, no downtime.
SecurePay first. Migrated to WPay. PCI Pal layered in for phone payments under PCI compliance.
Payment infrastructure swapped twice without disrupting checkout.
CMS promotions and banners.
Homepage banners, dashboard promotions, top categories and bonus offers at checkout, all controlled by PFD from the CMS.
The shop reads the same content engine the marketing team writes into.
Built for what's next.
Seven years on, the platform PFD started with is the platform PFD is still on. Upgraded, hardened and extended in place, not rebuilt every two years. The team that designed it runs it under retainer, releasing monthly, patching weekly, and shipping new features when the business needs them.
PFD is now part of the Woolworths Group. The shop they commissioned in 2018 is the shop carrying billions a year through to the kitchens, hospitals, schools and venues that depend on it.