Client Story · Chef's Warehouse
Scaling a distributor without scaling the overhead.
As The Chefs' Warehouse expanded across brands, markets, and product lines, the complexity behind its digital business grew with it. Luminos Labs built a commerce foundation designed to absorb that growth, making it easier to integrate new businesses, expand assortment, and add capabilities without adding the same level of overhead.
The Business Need
A Bigger Business Needed a Better Foundation.
The Chefs' Warehouse had grown into a multibillion-dollar foodservice business spanning Specialty Foods, Protein, Produce, and Middle East operations. Behind that growth, what started as commerce connected to a single ERP had expanded to four ERP platforms across 10 instances, each with its own data, integrations, and business rules.
Growth was creating a physical challenge, too. Customers wanted more assortment, but adding thousands of products through a traditional model meant more inventory, warehouse space, and fulfillment overhead.
Chefs needed a way to keep expanding without requiring its technology and operational footprint to expand at the same rate.
Brands → regions → ERP systems
Products → vendors → fulfillment
Both point to the same answer: a commerce platform built to absorb the complexity, not pass it along.
One Customer. A Lot Happening Behind the Scenes.
Specialty and Protein alone operated on different ERPs, with customer, product, pricing, inventory, and order data coming from different systems. Pricing spanned hundreds of millions of records.
The customer shouldn't have to understand any of that. Someone buying across multiple Chefs businesses should still experience one relationship with The Chefs' Warehouse.
The Approach
Stop Connecting Systems. Start Building Infrastructure.
Luminos recognized that continuing to solve each ERP connection individually wouldn't scale. We architected a centralized integration platform with Azure API Management as a common entry point and standardized contracts for how systems communicate.
Commerce could focus on the customer experience while the integration layer handled routing, security, transformations, and ERP-specific logic. More importantly, Chefs now had a model it could reuse. The next business, ERP, or region didn't have to mean another bespoke connection to commerce.
Azure API Management · standardized API contracts · routing & security
CHEF'S WAREHOUSE
Commerce Platform
ERP Platform 1
ERP System A
Instances
1–3
ERP Platform 2
ERP System B
Instances
4–6
ERP Platform 3
ERP System C
Instances
7–8
ERP Platform 4
ERP System D
Instances
9–10
CHEF'S WAREHOUSE
Commerce Platform
ERP Platform 1
ERP System A
Instances
1–3
ERP Platform 2
ERP System B
Instances
4–6
ERP Platform 3
ERP System C
Instances
7–8
ERP Platform 4
ERP System D
Instances
9–10
Different Businesses. One Digital Relationship.
Luminos extended the commerce foundation so Specialty and Protein could operate through the same broader digital experience while keeping the workflows each business required.
A single user can associate customer relationships across both businesses, while the platform determines the right catalog, pricing, inventory, units of measure, and business rules behind the scenes. Real-time inventory can come directly from the appropriate ERP when needed.
The complexity stays behind the experience. The customer just sees Chefs.
One login. Behind it, the platform quietly resolves whether an order runs through Specialty or Protein, and adjusts catalog, pricing, and units of measure accordingly. The customer never has to pick a side.
Sell More Without Stocking More.
We applied the same thinking to assortment. Luminos and Chefs built a reusable dropship model that separated what Chefs could sell from what it had to stock.
Vendor products, pricing, and inventory are incorporated into the existing ecosystem and merchandised alongside stocked products. Orders continue through Chefs' existing processes, while integrations identify dropship items, coordinate vendor fulfillment, and return shipment and tracking information to the customer's existing order history.
Chefs gained another way to grow assortment without building a separate buying experience or putting every new product in a warehouse.
Fulfilled from Chef's own network
Fulfilled by the vendor directly
Either way, the customer sees one order, one history, one Chef's Warehouse.
The Outcome
21,000+ New SKUs. Zero Warehouse Shelves Required.
In the first year, the dropship program grew to seven vendor partners and more than 21,000 vendor-fulfilled SKUs, increasing the online assortment by more than 10%. Tens of thousands of orders moved through the automated workflow without Chefs stocking those products itself.
The expanded assortment created a meaningful new revenue stream while minimizing the inventory investment normally associated with adding thousands of products.
Luminos did more than automate fulfillment. We helped Chefs change the economics of assortment growth.
10 ERP Instances. One Way In.
The integration platform now gives commerce one standardized way to work across four ERP platforms and 10 instances. New businesses and systems can reuse what Luminos already built instead of introducing another layer of custom logic.
The impact shows up in everyday operations, too. A route-data import that once took nearly an hour now takes a few seconds after Luminos replaced the multi-step process with a more direct integration.
Faster imports. Fewer steps. Same result.
Streamlining the path from Commerce to ERP.
Same import. Four fewer steps.
The Next Expansion Doesn't Start From Scratch.
The ERP architecture and dropship program solved two different growth challenges with the same strategy: build the capability once, then make it reusable.
Luminos built the foundation Chefs needed to support the business it had become, with a reusable architecture designed to make whatever comes next easier to absorb.
Ready to Make Growth Easier to Absorb?
If acquisitions, new brands, expanding assortments, or legacy integrations are making your commerce ecosystem harder to scale, talk to Luminos Labs about building a foundation designed for where your business is going next.
Talk To Us About Your Commerce Architecture →