Doudlah Farms — B2B Portal Implementation

Overview

Doudlah Farms is rolling out a B2B ordering portal to replace the current manual invoicing workflow. As of October 2025, the rollout is stalled at the customer onboarding step: gathering stable email addresses for accounts is proving difficult because key wholesale customers (particularly Epic) use rotating staff to place orders, making it impossible to assign a single, consistent account identity.

Related context: ^[1]

Current Blocker: Complex Customer Ordering Structures

The primary obstacle to launching the portal is that several wholesale customers do not have a single designated person or shared email for ordering. Specific examples surfaced in the October 2025 call:

• Epic operates five restaurants and uses 5–7 different staff members who rotate weekly to place orders. A single person orders for all five locations, but that person changes every week. Lucy has never seen the same person twice across orders.
• Metcalfe's has three locations, each with multiple staff who have placed orders at various times.
• Willie Street Co-op similarly has three locations with overlapping ordering contacts.

This creates downstream problems for Lucy beyond the portal setup: when tracking down unpaid invoices, she cannot easily identify which staff member placed a given order weeks prior.

Why This Matters

The B2B portal requires a stable email address per account. Without a consistent contact, account history becomes fragmented, and the portal's core benefits (visible pricing, automated invoicing, order history) are undermined.

Proposed Solution: Outreach to Establish Account Conventions

Rather than trying to map existing chaotic ordering patterns directly into the portal, the team agreed to proactively reach out to key customers and propose a streamlined account structure.

Approach:
- Karly will draft a template email for Lucy to send to key customer contacts (starting with Andrea, Epic's supervisor over all five restaurants).
- The email will frame the portal as a benefit to the customer: consistent pricing visibility, no need to manually request invoices, streamlined ordering.
- It will ask the customer how they'd like to structure their account — e.g., a shared ordering email per restaurant, or individual accounts per location.
- Lucy will personalize the template before sending, given her existing relationships.

Suggested account structure (Lucy's recommendation):
- Use a role-based or restaurant-based email rather than a personal one (e.g., voyager@epic.com or ordering@voyagerhall.com), so the account survives staff turnover.
- If individual accounts are preferred, inactive accounts (no activity for 12 months) can be flagged for deletion with customer permission.

Current Manual Invoicing Pain Points

Understanding the existing workflow helps frame why the portal is valuable:

1. A customer staff member places an order via email or phone.
2. Lucy downloads the order, creates an invoice, converts it to PDF, and emails it to the customer's AP department — a separate contact from the person who ordered.
3. The ordering staff never see the invoice; AP handles payment separately.

The portal would automate invoice generation and delivery, eliminating steps 2 and 3 from Lucy's workload.

Action Items

Open Questions

• Will Epic (or similar customers) already have a shared ordering email in use with other vendors? (Karly's hypothesis: likely yes, given Epic's scale and tech-savviness.)
• For customers with multiple locations (Metcalfe's, Willie Street), should each location get its own account, or one parent account with location notes?
• What is the policy for dormant accounts — 12-month inactivity threshold before deletion with customer notification?

Related Notes

• ^[1]
• ^[2]