InnovOrder: Serving up seamless digital food service solutions with Google Cloud
About InnovOrder
InnovOrder brings omnichannel transformation to the food service industry. It helps restaurants and caterers provide seamless digital experiences to their customers while managing all sales channels with a single software suite. Its 400 clients include industry-leading food chains and caterers such as Big Fernand, Quick, Bagel Corner, Amorino, Elior, and Compass.
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Contact usInnovOrder cuts development times in half, scales effortlessly with twice the traffic, and sets sights on global expansion by replacing an on-premises stack with a serverless Google Cloud environment.
Google Cloud results
- Improves the customer experience by decreasing latency by 200 to 300 milliseconds with Cloud CDN
- Handles traffic spikes effortlessly by scaling up and down with Google Cloud automatically
- Helps launch an innovative collaboration suite for kitchens, synchronizing data in real time with Firestore
- Accelerates the release cycle, enabling the team to develop features twice as fast
- Delivers 20% overall lower cloud cost than other providers
Scales up from 200 to 400 million requests per month
If food delivery services and digitized points of sale weren’t already commonplace before 2020, they certainly became indispensable when COVID-19 put dining out on pause. Restaurants and catering businesses that didn’t provide digital customer journeys needed to move fast, and InnovOrder had just the tools to make it happen.
“People tend to eat at the same times. It’s like the Christmas spike in retail, except twice a day for lunch and dinner, with few sales in between. To scale up and down automatically with a low operational burden for our team, we decided to migrate our infrastructure to Google Cloud.”
—Olivier Loverde, CTO and co-founder, InnovOrderFounded in 2014 and based in Paris, InnovOrder is a leading innovator in digital food service solutions. It helps restaurants and caterers serve their customers using omnichannel, digital experiences. With InnovOrder’s comprehensive software suite, businesses can integrate all their ordering channels, from online delivery to self-service kiosks, into a single, integrated platform. This enables them to streamline production management, monitor sales, and reduce costs. Businesses can either use InnovOrder as a ready-made product or integrate its plug-and-play API.
Putting food on millions of tables is hard enough in normal times, but when COVID-19 caused enormous spikes in traffic, the limited scalability of InnovOrder’s on-premises setup became a real issue. “People tend to eat at the same times,” explains Olivier Loverde, CTO and co-founder of InnovOrder. “It’s like the Christmas spike in retail, except twice a day for lunch and dinner, with few sales in between. To scale up and down automatically with a low operational burden for our team, we decided to migrate our infrastructure to Google Cloud.”
The choice of provider wasn’t a top-down directive, but a collective effort led in part by InnovOrder’s engineers, who were excited about the features and usability of Google Cloud. Of course, affordability was important as well, and Google Cloud came out on top in all categories: “We compared solutions from different providers and concluded that Google Cloud would deliver a more mature service at around a 20% lower cost than its competitors,” says Loverde.
Instant performance improvements with Cloud CDN
InnovOrder began the migration to Google Cloud in November 2020 by moving all of its front ends to Cloud CDN, achieving an instant increase in availability and other immediate benefits. “We’ve been able to decrease latency by 200 to 300 milliseconds just by switching to Cloud CDN, creating a more responsive user experience,” says Loverde.
Loverde and his team are leveraging Terraform’s infrastructure-as-a-code approach to provision containers in Kubernetes clusters orchestrated with Google Kubernetes Engine. By using a dedicated load balancer, they’re moving traffic to the new, microservices-based production environment bit by bit without causing any downtime for InnovOrder’s customers.
“Since our move to Google Cloud, it takes us about half the time to build new tools for our platform, so customers get to see new features faster. And without solutions such as Pub/Sub or Cloud Functions, some of our new features wouldn’t have been possible at all.”
—Olivier Loverde, CTO and co-founder, InnovOrderMore agility with a serverless stack
Today, InnovOrder has increased agility with an event-driven architecture in a serverless framework with Cloud Functions. Most production workloads are deployed to Google Kubernetes Engine, including all microservices, cronjobs, and the API.
Data, such as point-of-sale data and backups, which need to be saved for at least six years due to French regulations, are stored in Cloud Storage. The glue that holds everything together and connects all cloud services, allowing them to be autonomous and work in lockstep with each other, is Pub/Sub.
“Pub/Sub is an incredible product,” says Loverde. “It’s easy to use, scales to millions of messages per second, and enables us to create a company-wide event bus everyone can connect to in real time. It was a real game changer for us, and the root of everything else we’ve been able to achieve with Google Cloud.”
“Since our move to Google Cloud, it takes us about half the time to build new tools for our platform, so customers get to see new features faster. And without solutions such as Pub/Sub or Cloud Functions, some of our new features wouldn’t have been possible at all,” says Loverde.
Putting collaboration on the menu
When there are many cooks in the kitchen, there’s a lot that can impact the journey of a meal, from product shortages to order changes, all while new orders are coming in continuously. This is especially true during peak times. Leveraging the real-time data synchronization capabilities of Firestore, InnovOrder launched a collaboration app that can be deployed on multiple devices across the kitchen, enabling employees to edit orders simultaneously, with every change synchronized across all devices. The team had actually built this feature years ago, but ran into data synchronization problems they could solve easily with Firestore and Pub/Sub.
“Thanks to Firestore, we’ve been able to provide kitchens with a collaborative tool with a single source of truth, enabling employees to work together more collaboratively, while ensuring that their customers can order from the most up-to-date menus,” says Loverde.
Twice the traffic, a fraction of the effort
With its previous on-premises architecture, the InnovOrder team had to keep a watchful eye on every aspect of the stack and identify bottlenecks through constant load testing. Automatic scaling on Google Cloud allows the team to focus on core objectives, without having to worry about traffic spikes.
“As everyone went digital during COVID-19, our traffic doubled, going from 200 million to almost 400 million requests per month,” says Loverde. “Thanks to the scalability of our Google Cloud solutions, we’re now able to handle these peaks easily, eliminate downtime, and focus on new features instead of the stack.”
“With our technology stack, we’ve built in six years what took 30 elsewhere. Without any legacy systems, we’re like a new company with our new Google Cloud infrastructure. On our upcoming expansion, this will enable us to scale easily across multiple regions. With Google Cloud, we can go further, faster.”
—Olivier Loverde, CTO and co-founder, InnovOrderGetting ready for a taste of global expansion
Now that they’ve laid the groundwork with a scalable and robust serverless infrastructure, Loverde and his team are ready to spice up their cloud kitchen with new ingredients, especially in the area of artificial intelligence. “We’re really interested in the machine learning features of Google Cloud, such as AutoML and the Cloud Vision, to derive insights from our data and use it to bring exciting innovations for our customers,” says Loverde.
Already a major player in France, InnovOrder is now setting its sights on regions across Europe and the world. “With our technology stack, we’ve built in six years what took 30 elsewhere,” says Loverde. “Without any legacy systems, we’re like a new company with our new Google Cloud infrastructure. On our upcoming expansion, this will enable us to scale easily across multiple regions. With Google Cloud, we can go further, faster.”
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About InnovOrder
InnovOrder brings omnichannel transformation to the food service industry. It helps restaurants and caterers provide seamless digital experiences to their customers while managing all sales channels with a single software suite. Its 400 clients include industry-leading food chains and caterers such as Big Fernand, Quick, Bagel Corner, Amorino, Elior, and Compass.