A Marketplace milestone: ten years of customizable baskets.

It’s hard to believe it’s been ten years since we launched our online Marketplace. When we first started growing veg on rooftops, we delivered only a couple hundred predetermined baskets a week - just enough to fill up a single truck. Upon request, we’d adjust the orders of a handful of people…one phone call at a time. It wasn’t long before we needed to change our entire model, creating a website from scratch to meet the needs of our community and support our growth. 

Check out this short video of Nicolas, our VP of Technology. A key team member, he played an instrumental role in creating the Marketplace back in 2013 and his dynamic work continues to improve our online experience - keep scrolling to read more about its evolution over the years.

Patience and continued support while finding our footing. 

We’re proud to have developed everything in-house but despite our excitement the first edition of our Marketplace was painfully slow and crashed a little more often than we would’ve liked. Not only that, but because of our midnight customizing cutoff, the team often worked through the night, making sure every order was sent to our partners to be prepped in time for the morning deliveries. In short: 2013 was a year of trial and error, problem solving, patience (thank you!), and sleepless nights. 

From six to 20 categories and a much more user-friendly design. 

As we onboarded more partners and products, we changed our user interface to move from a category-based system to scrollable browsing, allowing Lufavores to move from item to item on their list seamlessly. We also added a button for folks to favourite their most-loved products, grouping them all in one place and ultimately making surfing the website more personalized.

Adding comments, ratings, and notifications for a better user experience.

Wanting insight on our growing number of products, we developed a comment and five-star rating system. Not only can Lufavores share their thoughts, but they can use the feedback from others to get unbiased info about products. Our partners also get the rare opportunity to hear what their customers think, adjusting recipes and developing other products based on comments.

Updated account setting, ETA status, and nutritional values.

It’s based on Lufavore responses to our annual survey that we make adjustments and improvements year after year. In 2016 we started offering home delivery, adding ETAs to the website and making them more precise. In 2021 our account settings also got a makeover, allowing you to skip or make changes to your delivery more easily. That same year you asked for nutritional values and our team developed a tool and meticulously added them to hundreds of products - one of the only online grocery services in Quebec to do so.

We wouldn’t be where we are today without the continuous conversations with our Lufavore community, be it through phone calls or comments, annual surveys, or webinars. We know there’s still work to do but we’re so proud of how far we’ve come. Shoutout to our unmatched IT team who continues to keep the bar high, always developing new tools to better support our mission of creating a better food system. Onward!