Graze's mission: to become the world's number one health food firm via technology
Graze co-founder and CTO explains that his job today is to "fix the problems I created when we started"
Online snack company Graze is on a mission to become the world's number one healthy food company via the use of technology.
Co-founder and CTO of Graze Edd Read told delegates at the Rackspace Solve 2016 event in London recently about this mission, first explaining what he sees as his main role today.
"My job now is to be responsible for fixing the problems I created back when we started," he joked.
Read built the firm's original website when it was launched in 2008. Today he sees the use of data as Graze's biggest strength.
"Graze is built on a data-fuelled culture," said Read. "We get 15,000 ratings [of Graze's products] per hour from social media, sales data and third party loyalty cards like Nectar."
This information is then stored in the Amazon Redshift data warehouse where it can be analysed to spot sales trends and help to identify new product opportunities. Everyone in the company has access to the data in this warehouse, Read said.
Besides product-related data, Graze's factory is flooded with Internet of Things sensors to monitor food and packaging production, with the goal of controlling quality and becoming more efficient.
The infrastructure underpinning this data generation and analysis is all hosted by Amazon Web Services (AWS).
"The infrastructure has been on AWS since day one, we were born in the cloud," said Read. "In 2008 it was all S3 instances with a console, and we treated it like a bunch of virtual machines. In the last couple of years we've embraced more of a cloud style pushing into managed services."
Graze has also begun implementing a DevOps culture within its technology teams.
"We're embracing the DevOps culture, because I'd rather the engineers accelerated innovation, rather than focusing on things like security," said Read.
"I want my team to spend time doing fun things rather than on infrastructure. Rackspace are like an extension of our IT team," said Read.