Built With MongoDB: Journey Foods

Siya Raj Purohit
March 9, 2021 | Updated: October 17, 2022
#BuiltWithMongoDB #Startups

Serial entrepreneur Riana Lynn has been building the future of food for more than a decade. While in graduate school and researching data and genetics at the University of Chicago, she launched one of the nation’s first juice bars which gave her an inside look at the supply chain issues plaguing the raw food industry. After that, Riana continued innovating in the sector: She built and sold two other companies, worked in venture capital, and, in 2018, launched her most ambitious startup yet – Journey Foods, a machine learning-powered software platform for food companies.

Just three years after its official launch, Journey Foods has raised $2.5 million from investors across three continents. It has partnered with global consortiums such as Future Food Network at Stanford, FoodTank, and University of Chicago on sustainability and data, and it now has more than 130 companies as customers, including Ingredion, one of the world’s largest ingredients companies, and Unilever.

For this edition of #BuiltWithMongoDB, we speak with Riana about food technology, scaling an artificial intelligence platform, and the future of food.

You have worked in food tech for most of your career. What specifically inspired you to start Journey Foods?

While I was working in venture capital, I wanted to find a product that could help us track an unprecedented amount of data about food: everything from optimizing the supply chain to price and nutrition.

We ended up building it ourselves using Google spreadsheets and a few APIs. I presented some of our early work in March 2019 to 1,500 food companies at a conference in San Francisco. Some of them asked us if we could apply our algorithms to their food products and work with their internal teams. That’s when we decided to take our work and turn it into a SaaS offering, and Journey Foods was born.

37,480 people for every 1 food scientist on the planet

There are so many problems we need to tackle to provide everyone with healthy and affordable food. What's your vision for Journey Foods?

We consider ourselves a technology company for the food industry—whether you are trying to source ingredients, optimize your supply chain, or get consumer insights as to how your product will perform in the market.

We aspire to be the leader for integrations in the food industry. We’ll be able to provide additional services that will help our customers scale and improve their portfolios much faster.

Right now we are trying to focus on developing our service to accurately provide nutrition insights, sustainability insights, and help save our customers money. We are prioritizing partnerships that will help us build out a big and dynamic ecosystem.

How did you decide to start building with MongoDB?

I wanted to make sure we could create something that was scalable, not only for startups but also for enterprise customers. In the first six months, we built the product on top of the Google Cloud Platform, a low-code app called Bubble, and a bunch of APIs. But our enterprise customers were using SAP and Microsoft Dynamics, and I realized that in order to provide offerings for these companies, we needed to have databases that could work at that same scale. We also needed better security for our customers, which is especially important in the food industry.

We looked at the tools the best software and data companies were using. We didn’t want clunky integrations that slowed us down. We’re also a design-heavy firm, so we’re thinking about the user experience as well.

Given MongoDB’s seamless user experience, ease of scalability, and stellar recommendations from other companies, we ended up building with MongoDB.

What's your favorite MongoDB feature?

This might not count as a feature, but the support and the follow-up we receive from MongoDB has been consistent and persistent. Our developers appreciate how easy it is to use the platform, and how seamless it is to share and collaborate on different things.

We also take advantage of many of the webinars, courses, and training programs that MongoDB offers. We want to move into more automation, machine learning, and artificial intelligence functionality, and we’re interested in seeing how MongoDB will help us evolve in that direction.

Looking forward to the next decade, what do you see as the biggest opportunities in the future of food?

I see two things. One has to do with overall nutrition and chronic disease. Over the past few years, we’ve seen dire numbers on chronic disease in every country in the world. Food technology is going to help improve those numbers.

Second is that with the pandemic, we went back to a lot of deleterious environmental practices in the supply chain, just so that we could meet demand in a quickly-changing world. The environment, along with affordability, is a very big interest both for companies and people. And we are bringing in data that is relevant to the biggest problems we see in the world with food, affecting the livelihood of people across the world.

For us, our competitive advantage lies in being the one-stop shop that integrates across many markets and partners, and that can drive the most actionable experience for our customers so we can define the future of the food industry.

Looking to build something cool? Get started with the MongoDB for Startups program.

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Switching Teams and Beginning a New Career as a Solutions Architect: Meet Idriss Ouazzani

I sat down with Idriss Ouazzani, a Solutions Architect (SA) based in France, to gain a deeper understanding of his fast track to success, rising from Customer Success Manager (CSM) to his current SA role in less than two years. We also spoke about his upbringing in Morocco, his deep love of learning, and the ways in which MongoDB has kept him motivated and energized. Jess Katz: Thank you for sharing your story, Idriss. Can you tell me what you did before joining MongoDB? Idriss Ouazzani: I was born and raised in Meknès, Morocco, and lived there until I was 18 years old. Although I did extremely well in the entrance exam for the Moroccan Army, I decided instead to move to France and further my studies in engineering. I was always passionate about new technologies, and I decided to pursue electronics/signal-processing engineering. While at university, I had a ton of impactful experiences, ranging from working as a receptionist in Japan to serving as Treasurer, and ultimately a President, of the third-biggest event in France for technical students, the Forum Toulouse Technologies. These experiences helped me discover another passion: business development. I decided to apply for a double degree partnership between the engineering school and the business school, and I ended up getting a master’s degree in engineering and business. From there, I decided to join Atos, a French multinational information technology service and consulting company, as an Enterprise Account Executive covering the business unit in France’s southwest region and managing a large portfolio. After more than two years at Atos, I started to feel as if my passion for technology wasn’t quite getting fulfilled. I decided to take on a new challenge, and move to a new country (Ireland) and join MongoDB! JK: What inspired you to join MongoDB? IO: During my time in sales at Atos, all my consultants were MongoDB lovers. They were so impressed by the technology and the continuous innovation that I couldn’t resist joining this young but well-established company. While doing some of my own research, I was blown away by the growth rate, the innovation, the developers’ feedback, and much more. JK: Can you walk us through your career path at MongoDB? IO: I joined MongoDB on August 19, 2019, as a CSM covering the entire French region. Moving from Toulouse, France, to Dublin, Ireland, I noticed that although the weather was colder, the atmosphere was so warm and welcoming. Even though I had an engineering background, I didn’t know much about databases when I joined. Week one, I remember getting introduced to MongoDB University, and I was so impressed with the quality of the content that I got addicted to it. Within a month, I completed the presales bootcamp training and the new-hire technical training prep course. Everytime I learned something new, I understood that there was so much more to learn. When you’re someone like I am who loves to learn, this is an amazing feeling. I quickly took the lead on solving some of our customers’ technical challenges in France. I remember the evenings I spent with our world-class Support Engineers finding creative solutions for a customer. I also built technical demos for my CSM colleagues and helped them expand their technical knowledge. From there, I became a CSM covering the Middle East in addition to France. As an Arabic speaker, it was a great opportunity for me to work with a new market and speak three different languages all the time while collaborating with an amazing team. Even though I was offered the opportunity to be a SA in France, my manager at that time wanted to promote me to Senior CSM for my contribution to the CS program and for helping the organization grow. This really demonstrated to me just how great a company MongoDB is. After several months in the Senior CSM role, I moved back to France and became an SA, and it’s been an incredible experience so far. JK: What excites you most about being an SA, and why? IO: Two months after I joined MongoDB, I went to Paris for the QBRs. There I met the SA team and started to learn about their role within the company. For those who don’t know, an SA is a salesperson with very strong technical skills whose role is to understand customers’ and prospects’ requirements and explain how MongoDB can help them solve their problems. I had one of these moments where you think to yourself, “That’s a job I could see myself doing.” I asked about the typical SA career path at MongoDB, and one impressive thing was that each SA I spoke with had a unique growth path, and they were all very passionate about their work and the technology. During the QBRs, I met Emmanuel Macé, an SA manager in France, and he saw the interest I had in the SA role. He made a decision that I will never forget: He asked me if I would like to attend a two-day team-building session at a French Normandy castle with the entire Southern Europe SA team to learn more about the role. After spending those two days learning more about the team and the role, I grew extremely interested in the opportunity. However, when speaking with my manager and other people, becoming an SA seemed like a longer-term goal (more than 3 years), because I needed sufficient technical knowledge before taking it on. A couple of months later, the COVID-19 pandemic started, and the lockdown followed shortly after. I was stuck in a tiny apartment in Dublin and decided to gain as much knowledge as possible in order to secure the SA role. I remember spending hours and hours teaching myself technical concepts. I ended up getting both a MongoDB Developer and Microsoft Azure certification. I reached out to my manager and the SA manager about the role and wound up going through an interview process. This included everything from logic and technical knowledge tests to interviews with managers and vice presidents and finally a challenge. Throughout the process, the CS leaders were there for me and provided their full support (a special thanks to Ruth Neligan, Sara Escribano-Slowey, and Julia Prause). JK: How have you been able to be creative in your roles at MongoDB? IO: I’ve never before been afforded this degree of freedom to create and innovate. In the CS org, each time I had an idea, I had full support from the managers to pursue it. During that time, I started a MongoDB championship concept: one-on-one speed “dating” with developers where they get 30 minutes to ask all the questions they want and much more. Additionally, when I had a technical question, other teams were always there to help. Last but not least, MongoDB’s managers know how to create a “safe space” for me and others to share all of our thoughts with complete transparency. JK: What are some interesting technical and creative aspects of being an SA? IO: When you are an SA, you’re focused on understanding your prospects’ and your customers’ needs. Oftentimes, they don’t know a lot about MongoDB, so the challenge is to become a MongoDB expert and to understand the technical aspects that surround it. When you are an SA in MongoDB, you need to fully understand other technologies (Kafka, Kubernetes, Spark, cloud providers’ offerings, Terraform, Ansible, and much more). You also need to understand the competitive landscape. I really like that we are at the cutting edge of technology. JK: What would you want potential candidates to know about working at MongoDB? IO: My advice is to be yourself. One key value we share is to “embrace the power of differences.” Be proud of what you’ve achieved, think big, and remember, I didn’t know much about databases when I joined, but I do now, and if you want to, you can too. And lastly, take risks. When interviewing me, the team saw potential when I raised my hand even though I was far from being a traditional candidate. JK: Did you have support from your managers each time you made an internal transfer? What were those conversations like? IO: This is one of the most impressive things I saw at MongoDB. I was scared about how my manager would react if I asked for an internal transfer, but each time, I had full support from my managers. As a matter of fact, they went a step further and asked me what they could do to teach me about the position I wanted to get. Interested in pursuing a career at MongoDB? We have several open roles on our teams across the globe , and would love for you to build your career with us!

March 9, 2021

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MongoDB: Powering Digital Natives

Today's rapidly evolving digital landscape is dominated by digital native companies, driving innovation . These are companies born in the digital age and who operate through digital channels with a business model enabled by technology and data. They are not only adept at using technology but are also reshaping the way software is developed and deployed. This article delves into the challenges and opportunities facing digital natives in modern application development, with a particular focus on the complexities of managing data. We’ll explore how the right data platform can empower your digital native organization to build high-quality software faster, adapt to changing market demands, and unlock the full potential of your business. Strong foundations: The four pillars of tech-fueled growth for digital natives Achieving explosive growth requires a strong foundation built on specific principles, which empower rapid scaling and success. Here, we explore the four key pillars that fuel tech-driven growth for digital natives: Product-market fit, fast: As a digital native, you must continuously ship and iterate products to achieve a quick product-market fit. This builds customer trust and captures opportunities before competitors can in an evolving market. Data and AI-driven decisions: You must leverage data to personalize experiences, automate processes, and guide product decisions. A robust data architecture feeds real-time data into AI models, enabling data-driven decisions organization-wide. Balance of freedom and control: Your developers must have the freedom to choose technologies, even as your organization maintains control over the infrastructure to manage risks and costs at scale. Selected technologies must integrate within your overall technology estate. Extensible and open technologies: You must explore disruptive technologies while maintaining existing systems. Freedom from platform and vendor lock-in enables quick adoption of innovations, from current generative AI capabilities to future technological advances. Data: The unsolved challenge in modern application development From cloud platforms and managed services to gen AI code assistants, advancements have transformed how engineering teams build, ship, and run applications: Agile methods and programmatic APIs streamline development, while CI/CD and infrastructure as code automate processes. Containerization, microservices, and serverless architectures enable modularity, while new languages and frameworks boost capabilities. Enhanced logging and monitoring tools provide deep application health insights. Figure 1: Tools and processes to maximize velocity. But none of these advancements address where developers spend most of their time— data . In fact, 73% of developers share time and again that working with data is the hardest part of building an application or feature. So why is data the problem? Traditionally, selecting a database, often an open-source relational one, is the first step in development. However, these databases can struggle with the characteristics of modern data: it’s high volume, unstructured, and constantly evolving. As applications mature and their data demands grow, development teams may encounter challenges with achieving scalability and maintaining service resilience. Some teams turn to NoSQL databases, but even then they find there are limited capabilities, pushing them back to relational databases. As the application gains traction, the business’s appetite for innovation grows, compelling development teams to incorporate an expanding array of database technologies. This results in an architectural sprawl, imposing on teams the challenges of mastering, sustaining, and harmonizing new technologies. Concurrently, the dynamic technology landscape undergoes constant evolution, demanding teams to swiftly adjust. As a result, self-contained, autonomous teams encounter these hurdles recurrently, highlighting the pressing need for streamlined solutions to mitigate complexity and enhance agility. Figure 2: The evolving tech landscape. Data sprawl: A major threat to developer productivity and business agility Data sprawl is slowing everyone down. The more systems we add, the harder it is for developers to keep up. Each new database brings its own unique language, format, and way of working. This creates a huge headache for managing everything—from buying new systems to making sure they all work together securely. It’s a constant battle to keep data accessible, consistent, and backed up across all these different platforms. Figure 3: Teams building on separate stacks leads to data sprawl and manageability issues across the organization It compromises every single one of the four outcomes your technology foundation should be providing, yielding the opposite results: Missed opportunities, lost customers: Fragmented development experiences consume time as engineers struggle with multiple technologies, frameworks, and extract, transform, and load mechanisms for duplicating data between systems. This slows down releases, degrades digital product quality, and impedes engineers from achieving product-market fit and effective competition. Flying blind: With your operational data siloed across multiple systems, you lack the data foundations necessary to use live data in shaping customer experiences or reacting to market changes. This is because you are unable to feed reliable, consistent, real-time data into your AI models to take action within the flow of the application or to provide the business with up-to-the-second visibility into operations. High attrition, high costs: Complex data architecture impacts development team culture, leading to siloed knowledge, inefficient collaboration, and decreased developer satisfaction. This complexity also consumes substantial resources in maintaining existing systems by diverting resources from new projects that are vital for business competition in new markets. Disruption from new technologies: Dependence on any one cloud provider can stifle innovation for development teams by restricting access to the latest technologies. Developers are confined to the tools and services offered by a single provider, hindering their ability to explore and integrate new, potentially more efficient, or advanced technologies. Speed: A unified developer experience for building high-quality software faster In today’s digital world, speed is king. Your customers expect seamless experiences, but clunky applications leave them frustrated. But traditional databases can be a bottleneck, struggling to keep pace with your ever-evolving data and slowing down development. The future of data is here, and it’s flexible: a data platform built for digital natives . It leverages a flexible document model, letting you store and work with your data exactly how you need it. This eliminates rigid structures and complex migrations, freeing your developers to focus on what matters—building amazing applications faster. Flexible document data models empower developers to handle today’s rapidly evolving application data ( 80%+ unstructured) that relational databases struggle with. MongoDB documents are richly typed, boosting developer productivity by eliminating the need for lengthy schema migrations when implementing new features. Developers get to use their preferred tools and languages. Through its drivers and integrations, MongoDB supports all of the most popular programming languages, frameworks, integrated development environments, and AI-code assistance tools. MongoDB scales! It starts small and scales globally. Built for elasticity and horizontal scaling, it handles massive workloads without app changes. Figure 4: A unified developer experience, integrating all necessary data services for building sophisticated modern applications Introducing MongoDB Atlas : a fully-managed cloud database built for the modern developer. It enables the integration of real-time data from devices with AI capabilities (through vector embeddings and large language models ) to personalize user experiences. Stream processing empowers constant data analysis, while in-app analytics provides real-time insights without needing separate data warehouses, all while automatically managing data movement and storage for cost-effectiveness. MongoDB Atlas simplifies database management with the following: Easy deployment via UI, API, CLI, Kubernetes, and infrastructure as code tools. Automated operations for cost-effective performance and real-time monitoring. MongoDB Atlas customer success stories: Development with speed, scale, and efficiency Delivery Hero Delivery Hero, a global leader in online food delivery, leverages MongoDB Atlas to power its rapid service. Founded in 2011, Delivery Hero now serves millions of customers in over 70 countries through brands like PedidosYa, foodpanda, and Glovo. Having replaced its legacy SQL database, Delivery Hero optimized operations and bolstered performance by using MongoDB Atlas. By leveraging MongoDB Atlas Search, Delivery Hero revolutionized its search functionality, ensuring a seamless user experience for its extensive customer base through simplified indexing and real-time data accuracy. MongoDB’s scalability has empowered Delivery Hero to manage over 100 million products in its catalog without encountering latency issues, enabling the company to expand its services while maintaining peak performance. This agility, coupled with MongoDB’s cost-effectiveness, has enabled Delivery Hero to swiftly adapt to evolving customer demands, solidifying its position in the fiercely competitive delivery market. MongoDB Atlas Search was a game changer. We ran a proof of concept and discovered how easy it is to use. We can index in one click, and because it’s a feature of MongoDB, we know data is always up-to-date and accurate. Andrii Hrachov, Principal Software Engineer, Delivery Hero Read the full customer story to learn more. Coinbase Coinbase, a prominent cryptocurrency exchange boasting 245,000 ecosystem partners and managing assets worth $273 billion , trusts MongoDB to handle its extensive data workload. As the company grew, MongoDB scaled seamlessly to accommodate the increased demand. To further improve performance in the fast-paced crypto world, Coinbase partnered with MongoDB to develop a system that significantly accelerated data transfer to reporting tools, reducing processing time from days to a mere 5-6 hours. This near real-time data access enables Coinbase to rapidly analyze trends and make informed decisions, maintaining a competitive edge in the ever-evolving crypto landscape. Watch Coinbase's full session at MongoDB.local Austin, 2024 to learn more. MongoDB: Your flexible platform for digital growth With MongoDB, you can freely explore, experiment, develop, and deploy according to your digital-native business needs. If you would like to learn more about how MongoDB can empower your digital-native business to conquer market trends, visit: Innovate With AI: The Future Enterprise Application-Driven Intelligence: Defining the Next Wave of Modern Apps AI-Driven Real-Time Pricing with MongoDB and Vertex AI

November 7, 2024