Powering a Community of Food and Beverage Lovers
Foodea.com co-founders Matthew Harris and Michael Blankier envisioned a communal online space where foodies could come together to swap and share recipes, browse a growing epicurean marketplace, find interesting reading, and share an open pantry for interaction. At the start of 2008, the pair set out to create their portal, www.foodea.com. With the help of Codesta, Harris and Blankier were able to meet their launch goal, debuting a new community site just in time for Canada’s leading food tradeshow, the Gourmet Food & Wine Expo.
"Our vision is to create a top destination resource site; one we hope will bring the food and beverage lover worlds together," said Blankier. "When we first looked into launching a new community we took a look at what was out there and determined where we could be unique. Nonexistent was a site where people like us, occasional but not avid cooks, could visit to get feedback on our recipes, plus encouragement from other cooks on how to improve skills. At the same time, we felt businesses really didn’t have a place to represent themselves on their own terms to a passionate community of cooks."
"We made it our goal to have a basic architecture, business plan, list of key deliverables, company roadmap and timeline in place for this important show in Toronto," adds Blankier. "But to really get where we envisioned, it became evident we’d need an experienced dev team to help us. We had dedicated a lot of time designing a roadmap for features sets and an overall look, but additional technical development would be needed."
Into the Mixing Bowl
While attending mesh, Canada’s leading Web conference, Foodea learned of Codesta from Peter Evans, Venture Group Advisor with the MaRS Discovery District. Harris and Blankier met with Codesta, immediately adding them to their short list of Web development partner candidates. "Aside from building visibility for our new venture, a key objective for being at mesh was to locate and engage a technical team able to take our new food community to the next level," said Harris. Following the show, Foodea interviewed several tech teams and chose Codesta as their newest partner. "We felt Codesta would be the most adept at helping us set-up for growth. Their depth for working with companies our size and just starting out contributed plenty of relevant expertise and experience"
Robert Osborne, Codesta Director, noted, "The Foodea duo was more prepared than most startups we speak with. They had a clear concept and vision mapped out; what they really needed was a strong technical direction to match that vision." Harris and Blankier had also designed site page mock-ups, a features map, integration methodology, CSS templates that dictated overall look and feel, plus GUI. "In the short run having components such as these in place really helps things come together faster. It sped decisions about, and build-out of, appropriate platform and functional aspects."
Blankier shares that on a personal level initial and ongoing meetings with Codesta were a joy to attend as the team was always collaborative, accessible and creative. "It became clear that Codesta enjoyed working with us and believed in what we were doing--which was tremendous encouragement. They were always eager to help in any way they could, even when it didn’t necessarily profit them directly."
Ingredients for Launch
Within one week Codesta was prepared to architect a more efficient Web framework, select and migrate operations to an optimal hosting partner, plus help Foodea build more functional Web site areas such as:
- A robust extendable social media platform
- Efficient content management system
- Improved user-generated content forms
- Powerful taxonomy tools
After precisely assessing site viewer behavior, project scope and budget, Codesta made a recommendation to move Foodea to Drupal 5.7 for a content management system, citing Drupal’s stable environment and superior product platform support. Developing with Drupal allowed Codesta to bring a rich social networking features set (forums, user generated content, messaging, reviews, ratings pages) and excellent programmability. The platform could also be easily managed day to day by non-technical staff. Osborne also recommended Drupal over alternatives knowing Foodea’s tight time-to-market considerations.
For optimal hosting of the new community, Amazon’s Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2) virtualization platform was selected to reduce up front capital costs and its ease of deployment and maintenance. EC2 also offers an outstanding ability to quickly and easily scale--ideal for supporting Foodea through its anticipated rapid growth.
Codesta carried out design and development following the Scrum methodology. Working in one week sprints allowed the team to remain flexible and open to changes needed as the project came together, or as requested by Foodea. Blankier lauded Codesta’s thorough, precise and personable follow-through on all aspects of the project. "We had excellent back and forth at all times. The team was always eager to help. They brought first rate clarity, and easily moved us through a few minor bumpy development patches when the unexpected happened."
Codesta delivered a robust public demo site by August 2008. Over the next few months Codesta worked to remedy small bugs and fixes, plus continue rolling out new features. A fully working site went live on November 24, just in time for the Toronto Gourmet Food & Wine Expo. "We put the Codesta team on a tight timeline and budget and they came through."
Dessert and More
"It was really great to find the Codesta team," said Harris. "We had a vision and decent level of technology knowledge, but Codesta brought the missing pieces to the table. Their knowledgeable and strategic talent helped us prioritize and validate every feature, ultimately giving an even more complete community and site than originally envisioned. This team is expert in Drupal Web site design and implementation."
Codesta remains engaged as Foodea’s technical team, continuing to bring value to a growing community of food lovers. "This was a very cool project and we definitely believe in both the business and its founders. We enjoy working with start-up teams in a partnership arrangement, and are thrilled when we can help bring a founder’s vision that much closer to reality, says Pat McCarten, Codesta Managing Director.
About
Foodea.com is where food lovers connect to share their passions. Foodea.com is a user-driven food Web site that enables anyone to create and upload food ideas, including recipes, drinks, articles, pictures, and videos, as well as profiles for commercial food businesses such as restaurants and products, among others. Users can then share and organize what they’ve created or discovered. www.foodea.com
Codesta offers emerging companies such as Foodea the design and engineering support to help customers bring to market their visionary business ideas. Codesta functions as a technology consultancy firm providing custom software products specialist with expertise in product management, software design and development/design of large scale web applications. Team development experts work closely with a client from initial white board mapping--through timeline estimation, software development, systems implementation and any required ongoing support. www.codesta.com