Client Story · Chef's Warehouse
Scaling a distributor without scaling the overhead.
As Chef's Warehouse grew across brands, regions, and back-office systems, each wave of growth threatened a wave of operational complexity. Two builds met it with architecture instead of overhead.
Chef's Warehouse is a leading specialty food distributor, serving restaurants, hospitality, healthcare, and foodservice across the United States, Canada, and the Middle East. Founded in 1985, it runs a catalog of more than 88,000 products across four storefronts.
Growth at that scale wants to add cost: more warehouses, more headcount, more one-off integrations with every new brand. Chef's Warehouse took a different route on two fronts, letting the architecture carry the complexity rather than the operation.
A dropship program that grows the catalog while the warehouse stays put
Vendor-fulfilled products, merchandised and ordered as if they were in stock.
Customers wanted a broader assortment than Chef's Warehouse could economically stock. The traditional fix, more inventory and more warehouse space, would have meant heavy investment for products that might sell slowly. The business needed to add product lines fast without adding fulfillment overhead, and without the customer ever noticing a difference at checkout.
At a glance
What: Vendor-fulfilled dropship program · Model: Third-party products merchandised alongside stocked inventory · Integration: Routed and automated through the existing ERP
Systems integrated
The build
The whole thing had to be invisible to the customer, so we ran it through the system they already trusted: the ERP. Vendor catalog data, products, pricing, and live inventory, gets integrated there, which lets dropship items sit alongside stocked products with no seam a shopper could see. Orders route through the ERP, which spots the dropship line items on its own and hands fulfillment to the vendor through backend integrations, no one touching it in the middle. Shipment and tracking flow back into the ERP and storefront, so whether a product left a Chef's Warehouse dock or a vendor's, the customer sees a single order history. The point was to add a whole fulfillment model without asking the customer, or the operations team, to learn anything new.
vendor-fulfilled SKUs added, growing the online assortment by more than 10% without expanding warehouse inventory.
- 7 vendor partners onboarded onto a repeatable model, establishing a foundation for future catalog expansion.
- 40,000+ dropship orders processed through the automated workflow in the first year, with no added fulfillment overhead.
One integration architecture for four ERPs
A centralized layer that treats enterprise integration as a system in its own right, rather than a pile of point-to-point connections.
As Chef's Warehouse expanded past its original Specialty Foods business into new brands and Middle East operations, each ran on a different ERP. Every new brand meant another set of custom, point-to-point integrations between commerce and back office. That path gets more brittle and more expensive with each addition. Left alone, it would have made the whole digital platform harder to scale with every acquisition.
At a glance
Scope: 4 ERP platforms across 10 ERP instances · Model: Centralized integration layer behind a standardized API · Principle: Keep the commerce platform clean, keep integration logic where it can be owned
Systems integrated
The build
Instead of wiring commerce to each ERP directly, the integration became its own system. A central API gateway, built on Azure API Management, is the single secure entry point for all integration traffic. It presents one consistent API contract and routes each request to the right backend based on the target brand and ERP. Routing, security, and ERP-specific logic live in the integration layer where they can be owned and evolved independently, which keeps the commerce platform itself clean. Azure Functions and supporting services were consolidated into one unified platform serving every brand, ERP, and region.
Route data imports dropped from nearly an hour to a few seconds, once multi-step imports were replaced with direct integrations.
- Faster onboarding for new brands and acquisitions, since a new ERP plugs into a standard contract instead of a fresh custom integration.
- A reusable foundation, where integration, routing, and business logic are owned in one place and evolve without touching the commerce platform.
Scale the business. Not the overhead.
Both builds solved the same problem in different corners of the business. Growth always wants to add cost somewhere, another warehouse, another headcount, another integration, and the job of good architecture is to keep saying no to that. It is what let Chef's Warehouse expand the catalog and the brand portfolio while the operational weight underneath stayed roughly flat.
If growth keeps adding operational complexity faster than it adds revenue, that's a solvable problem.
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