Taking Shopping to the Streets with FreshDirect's iPhone App

The Story

In New York, you can't walk down the street these days without seeing a FreshDirect grocery delivery truck. A recent addition to the list of beloved Gotham institutions, FreshDirect's online grocery service quickly gained a cult following after launching in 2002. Customers were drawn to FreshDirect because of its incredible convenience, fresh food (including organic and locally grown items), customer service, and prices that are substantially lower than most Manhattan supermarket chains (cough, Whole Foods). Today, FreshDirect has delivered about 10 million individual orders to hungry New Yorkers (and to some of those Jersey people too).

When a 2009 survey revealed that 50% of their customers with smartphones have iPhones, the web-based company asked us (Schematic) to partner with them in creating a mobile strategy, and to build an app that would make buying groceries even easier for their customers on the go.

The Solution

Perhaps the most complex transaction-based commerce application available in the App Store to date, the FreshDirect iPhone app delivers about 90% of the same functionality available on FreshDirect.com. The FreshDirect app was envisioned as an experience that enables users to access FreshDirect's entire inventory of food and brand-name groceries, while promoting their proprietary website features such as nutritional information and daily produce and seafood quality ratings. We also implemented the site’s Quick Shop feature, which makes it fast and easy to shop from previous orders, favorite items, or curated lists such as "President's Picks" and "Featured Deals". The app enables their customers to start a new order from scratch on their iPhones, as well as modify an existing order or delivery time.

In order to deliver on this level of functionality, a close partnership was established with the business and technical stakeholders within FreshDirect's organization. Not only was the team responsible for the iPhone application itself, but also the server-side infrastructure and applications that the iPhone app would integrate with. The close partnership was critical to avoid duplicating or rebuilding the existing and enormously complex business logic that dictates product availability and pricing in SAP, delivery scheduling and status information that is managed via UPS and product content administered via Day CQ5. The architecture involved wrapping JSP taglibs using Spring to trick the taglibs into thinking they were being executed via a browser and a traditional HTTP/HTTPS request. This allowed the server-side team to focus on writing a full-featured and stable REST API to power the iPhone application. Long-term strategies for release and change management were addressed in addition to issues around multiple API versions and iPhone app versions in the wild.

Stats and Figures

Role: Solutions Architect
Client: FreshDirect
Year: 2009-2010
Download Now

• Java/Spring REST API
• Obj-C iPhone App
• Featured App and Staff Pick in App Store