Revolutionizing the food pick-up experience for Cargill

Driven by the vast industry knowledge of Cargill’s food experts, Chekt is a smart modular food locker solution designed to automate controlled handoff for takeout and delivery order pickup. The product combines state-of-the-art locker pods and robust, flexible, enterprise-ready software with vast integration capabilities. It establishes a new front-of-house experience for quick-serve restaurants.

Our strategic partnership with Chekt began with an architecture assessment phase. While Chekt’s initial team was well suited for the pilot stage of the project, the company required an additional partner with the experience and the mature processes necessary to help Chekt scale. 

We established a cross-functional collaboration to bring out the product’s true value going forward. Our teams conducted a comprehensive codebase and infrastructure analysis to discover potential security vulnerabilities, technical risks to the product’s vision, and technology implementation and reliability issues. 

After identifying gaps in the infrastructure, we collaborated with Chekt’s initial development team to address the most pressing issues and ensure the product’s stability and security. Our phased approach allowed us to begin work on implementing new features and services while the initial Chekt team collaborated with us on fixing bugs. 

The initial architecture assessment gathered actionable insights and allowed us to build the right team of experts for the product’s specific needs. Blending strategic insights with deep web development, cloud-native expertise, and human-centered design practices, we collaborated with Chekt stakeholders to stabilize the product and address scale readiness issues. Then, we updated the existing software infrastructure from its prior monolithic state to one that is microservice-based and integrated additional security capabilities to eliminate vulnerabilities. 

A microservice-based approach allowed us to scale the product more effectively, maintain the architecture better, and deploy seamlessly without any friction or downtime. It helped Chekt improve the workflow and flexibly bring beneficial processes to production. Additionally, it enabled the development team to turn features on and off depending on the customer’s configuration needs. This allowed further flexibility as the team could focus on supporting one application but could quickly provide custom experiences based on location needs.

A roadmap to success
We provided a variety of diagrams and schemas of how to change the product’s infrastructure, juxtaposing the new features and direction with the current state of the product. This helped us achieve a cohesive product vision and gave Chekt a better understanding of how our experts envisioned the new infrastructure setup. Additionally, stakeholders on both sides of the project were equipped with insights and technological expertise on what new microservices to implement and at what cadence. 

After achieving product stability, the microservices approach really showed its value. The changes we made to the infrastructure enabled Chekt to support location-specific features, while the usability and flexibility of the pods themselves made the product stand out among the competition. Implementing a new webhook service allowing for push notifications to partnering apps helped Chekt secure major integration partnerships with some of the biggest food delivery applications in the U.S.

Eliminating stability issues, streamlining workflows, and rethinking the technical architecture transformed Chekt into a truly scalable enterprise-ready digital product. As a result of our work together, Chekt secured new partner integrations and won several major new clients. Additionally, our continuation engineering team took over the support of the Chekt product, providing a customized Tier 1 call support solution that ensures that the product operates smoothly. To date, we’ve handled every issue presented to us aside from hardware-related issues.