In 2015, H-E-B started something new. At a single store, utilizing a paper process to manage the fulfillment side of the equation, we quickly piloted Curbside service. And almost as quickly, customers fell in love. I was lucky enough to start at H-E-B at the same time—building the Curbside Fulfillment tool that would upgrade the process from pen and pad to a robust, time-saving app. Just as quickly as the demand grew, the app became an absolute necessity to support our burgeoning business line.
The development of Curbside (and my life) over the last five years has moved pretty fast. That speed of adaption has been key to successful growth.
Start fast
Since H-E-B began in 1905, we innovated long before we were “ready.” Florence Butt started the first H-E-B delivery service using a baby carriage before upgrading to a little red wagon, a horse and buggy, and finally a Ford delivery truck.
Taking a cue from Florence, we didn’t wait to launch Curbside until we had a robust app to support it. We knew the value of running a scrappy test and opted to launch our Curbside Fulfillment tool in a single store. We started at the Bunker Hill location in Houston, by running Curbside with nothing more than a WordPress and paper to track fulfillment (yes, really). The engineering team visited the store during our work on the application. Actually seeing the business was eye-opening. Partners were getting tons of requests and were forced to cap orders because of the overhead. I couldn’t wait to help.
Once we built the app with the functionality we knew customers wanted (like substituting unavailable products), we launched at two more stores. There were some hiccups and lots of adjusting to the new process, but very quickly, things were moving along. I vividly remember a local news station reporting on Curbside, showing their correspondent picking up groceries from the Bandera store in San Antonio with his kids in the car while our Partner loaded their groceries. To me, that moment really cemented that Curbside was here to stay.
As the Curbside business and our application started to spread and thrive in the wild, our various teams met plenty of challenges. It felt like cutting through a jungle and discovering a new world. We knew that adapting and being agile would be the key to meeting whatever needs arose.
Figure it out fast
Texans know that each H-E-B store is unique, from the products in stocks to the shape of the store itself. Adding space for an entire Curbside operation is tough enough, let alone when each individual store requires its own specific answer. And that was just finding where to put operations.
There’s a huge difference between how an app and a process work in theory versus in action at scale. Our engineers had to keep being as agile as possible to scale and adapt as the landscape changed. That meant completely overhauling how the basic shopping flows worked. We changed the UI and experience to take the app from feeling like a proof of concept to a real enterprise app. We added a variety of screens both for web and mobile to ensure stores were equipped with the data they needed to be successful. On the backend, our team focused to ensure that our infrastructure and code were as performant to support an aggressive rollout and a growing future.
