The Farmer’s Dog is a fresh dog food service that has delivered over 200 million meals in the U.S. Founded by two dog lovers who were fed up with highly processed, burnt brown balls being marketed as “natural” and “healthy,” they decided to reimagine pet food from the ground up. Using decades of pet nutrition research, The Farmer’s Dog worked with top vet nutritionists to create a fresh, convenient dog food service that surpasses all quality and food safety in the industry.
The Farmer’s Dog’s strategic priority was to develop strong relationships with veterinarians, as they are the trusted professionals who work towards ensuring the health and wellness of dogs. However, their restrictively manual backend process presented a challenge in maintaining relationships and expanding their reach with their veterinary targets; they had multiple internal resources individually managing the communication with the vets and did not have a formal program in place to incentivize or track referrals to meet their business goals.
Rootstrap was also committed to continuously improving the user experience on the Vet Portal. This involved the integration of new APIs and functionality designed to facilitate the registration of veterinarians on the platform, with the ultimate goal of increasing conversions.
Rootstrap joined the Vet Portal project early, leading to the refactoring of key functions such as the authentication system. From this point forward, they took on the responsibility of the comprehensive development of the system, including creating interfaces and dashboard pages, implementing password reset systems, creating contact forms, discount requests, and email sending using Amazon services.
Rootstrap actively participated in developing the FMS platform, collaborating on decisions related to design, software architecture, and user experience. Our contribution spanned from the initial phases of the project to its conclusion, ensuring the implementation of all functionalities required by The Farmer’s Dog. Various AWS services, such as Lambda functions and Kinesis, were also added/modified, along with the communication of different microservices within the company.
During Super Bowl 2022, Rootstrap developed and implemented new features while maintaining the main website’s system. This period coincided with a sales and website visit record, highlighting the team’s ability to handle high-traffic and demand situations. Additionally, a platform check is generally conducted for important dates with anticipated high traffic, such as Black Friday, where load tests are performed, and areas for performance improvement are reviewed.
Rootstrap redesigned some aspects of the user interface of the website, focusing on the user panel during the account creation process on the platform; specifically, they worked on TOSA (Totally Optimized Signup Architecture), a frontend application that allows customers to sign up for The Farmer’s Dog—this effort aimed to improve usability and the overall user experience.
Core API is The Farmer’s Dog's main API, where a significant part of the core business logic resides. A major refactor of the tests was performed, improving coverage and migrating them to TypeScript from JavaScript. More up-to-date libraries, such as Jest and Supertest were also adopted.