Califrais digitizes Rungis Market via Platform.sh

As a leading food wholesaler and major player in the food supply chain, Rungis Market seeks to satisfy its professional customers by digitizing  solutions. To do this, it called upon Califrais, which modeled itself PaaS after Platform.sh, to implement a brand-new ecommerce website, rungismarket.com. Here's the story of a future-forward company’s digital transformation and its big plans for the future.

The challenge: Reinventing the food supply chain with artificial intelligence

For the past eight years, Rungis Market's startup Califrais has been using machine learning and other innovative digital tools to optimize large-scale food logistics flows. Machine learning involves highly innovative artificial intelligence algorithms developed in-house in collaboration with academic institutions such as the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), Sorbonne University, and Paris Cité University.

Today, Califrais is in charge of the new ecommerce website rungismarket.com, which consolidates the wholesalers of the Rungis Market in a whole new way. Califrais  has partnered with the STEF Group to handle the transportation side, and with Webhelp to optimize customer management. The new service lets B2B customers place a single order for all their fresh produce from Rungis Market, and they can receive a delivery in record time, with competitive prices and unmatched reliability. These features are part of the process to accelerate Rungis Market’s digital transformation.

Given the complexity of Rungis Market's activity (such as the preparation and grouping of extremely large orders by multiple suppliers in very little time), a custom ecommerce platform had to be developed, along with new logistics tools adapted to the specific demands of a wholesale food market.

Despite these unique challenges, Califrais was able to develop the project with Symfony directly on Platform.sh, without the need to rely on a DevOps resource.

Opting for the flexibility of Platform.sh

After an in-house development phase, Califrais benchmarked and tested many cloud hosting solutions, including Symfony Cloud and AWS. At the end of the day, the company went with Platform.sh. 

Renaud Grand, CTO of Califrais, explains: "Even if we had done a lot of work on Kubernetes, it would have been less flexible and practical for us than Platform.sh. We also couldn't deny the advantages provided by GitHub integration and pull requests for pre-production environments. At the moment, we spend less than an hour per week on Ops. This would have been unthinkable with an in-house solution."

Easy to get started

The use of Platform.sh has improved productivity. 

"The time we save on the maintenance and upgrading of the infrastructure is now spent on development," Grand adds. Another major advantage? Califrais can now catch its breath between the deployment phase and the release.

However, there was another factor that shaped the startup's decision to choose Platform.sh.

"Califrais is a responsible company with strong CSR goals: thanks to the optimization and grouping of Rungis Market workflows, we expect to save 30,000 tons of CO2 by 2024,” Grand explains “Above all, we wanted high-density hosting from a host committed to reducing its carbon footprint and aligned with our convictions. Platform.sh identifies data centers according to their carbon footprints and provides full transparency on our own emissions." 

Six months and more than 10,000 deliveries later, the digital transformation is well underway—and highly successful thanks to Platform.sh, which will continue to assist the Califrais team in all its future endeavors. And it will be there for the inevitable surge ahead.