An insider's look at three cool places where you do your jobs.
An e-comm taste-tester
As FreshDirect CTO, Miles Trachtenberg combines a love of technology with the joy of good food.
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The best part about being CTO at online grocer FreshDirect is “product development,” says Myles Trachtenberg with a grin. “Product development – aka having taste treats every so often,” he adds while handing a visitor a slice of apple-cranberry pie. Delicious as it is, the pie is still “under development.”
FreshDirect doesn’t kid around when it says, “It’s all about the food.” Sure, the company manufactures and distributes a wide variety of fresh foods to people in the New York metropolitan area who order the groceries online, but food is more than that to the company. It’s in the DNA of the place, from the occasional barbecues in the street, to the ice-cream truck that keeps the manufacturing plant on its route, to the photos of pears, grapes and cheese that hang in the lobby of the administrative building.
Four-year-old FreshDirect isn’t shy about its innovative approach to the age-old grocery business. The company’s bright yellow manufacturing plant stands out from an industrial area of Long Island City like a ripe banana. A massive electronic billboard – the largest of its kind in the U.S. – juts from the rooftop and flashes 65-foot-high images of fresh produce at motorists approaching the Queens Midtown Tunnel.
The plant only shuts down a couple days of the year. Otherwise, the operation runs 24/7 – an IT infrastructure overhaul that Trachtenberg undertook last year makes sure of this.
A 15-year IT veteran, Trachtenberg joined FreshDirect in November 2003, charged with making sure that customers complete their orders at freshdirect.com. FreshDirect didn’t want shoppers to become frustrated by long wait times or site outages and ditch online ordering in favor of walking down to their corner grocery stores.
Trachtenberg fulfilled that mission, bringing average response times to less than 1 second. He accomplished this while saving $1.2 million in software licenses, service and hardware costs.
Moving from a set of Sun Solaris servers to an Egenera BladeFrame made up of two-way server blades running Linux and VMware virtualization software helped Trachtenberg garner such savings. VMware lets FreshDirect create up to four virtual servers on each blade, with a total of 46 virtual servers today. These virtual servers are divided into two clusters – one supports the live Web site, and the other is “dormant.” Site enhancements are implemented on the dormant side then phased over to the live side as new customers connect to the servers.
“We have a very dynamic business, where we’ve got new products, new prices, different promotions – and I never shut down the Web site,” Trachtenberg says.
This represents a dramatic shift from the previous two-and-a-half years of the operation, where any changes to the site were done in a five-hour window – between 1 a.m. and 6 a.m – during which the IT department shut down the site, rebuilt the platform, validated it and got it back into production.
Now FreshDirect can make a graceful transition within a 90-minute window – during the middle of the day – without taking the site down.
“My people can preserve their lives; they’re not up at all hours of the night,” Trachtenberg says of his 43-member team. “Also, I can be very responsive to the business. I don’t have to wait a good 24 hours before something new can be seen on the site.”
Helping with the response time is a pair of NetScaler load balancers. These application accelerators intelligently balance loads among servers based on how taxed those servers are. Plus, they cache content and accelerate SSL transactions to speed the process further.
Once the orders are in and paid for, the data goes from the virtual storefront (at a collocation point in downtown New York) to FreshDirect’s 300,000-square-foot facility.
The company uses Oracle Spatial software to determine the location of customers, down to units in an apartment building. Orders are organized by RouteSmart Technologies’ logistics software, which determines how to best organize the food orders based on the locations of the recipients.
The data then goes into an SAP production system, which sends meat orders to the butcher’s touchscreen. The butcher cuts, wraps, bar codes and sends the meat down a conveyor belt. The process is repeated for all the departments, and conveyors lead to a sorting area where employees assemble boxes of groceries based on what the system instructs.
Meanwhile, the transportation department watches how delivery zones and time slots are filling up, and then adjusts capacity on demand in real time. If there’s an area where there are more orders coming in, a larger truck can be used, for example.
In all, FreshDirect now produces more than 1 million items a week spread across 30,000 orders.
To do that takes a really diverse team, and Trachtenberg marvels at the variety of people he works with on a daily basis – butchers, bakers, truck drivers, warehouse personnel, software developers, marketers and a nutritionist. A rabbi even comes in during the kosher food preparations.
In the end, though, a conversation with Trachtenberg inevitably comes back to the food.
“This past weekend, I had the most amazing T-bone,” he says. “It was just ridiculous. It was 2 inches thick. It took probably 30 minutes to cook this thing. It was phenomenal. You have to try our meat here.”
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