Pivoting to online ordering and delivery during COVID.

In March 2020, Tractor Foods went from a dine-in, counter-service business to one that needed to serve customers who were no longer walking through the door. The existing online presence was minimal. Delivery was an occasional experiment, not an operational channel.

The business needed revenue, fast. But it also needed a model that wouldn't break the kitchen, the staffing model, or the already-stressed supply chain.

I evaluated and onboarded five delivery partners in a matter of weeks, negotiating rates, integrating menus, and setting operational rules for prep times, packaging, and handoff zones. Each partner started as a separate integration so revenue could start flowing immediately.

Once the channels were live, I consolidated every integration into Olo using Olo Rails so ParPOS, Olo, and the aggregator menus stayed in sync — out-of-stock items stopped becoming refund requests, and menu changes propagated everywhere from one place.

I also built the internal workflow: a daily delivery handoff checklist, a central Microsoft Teams channel for driver issues, and a simple dashboard so each location could see which channels were driving demand without logging into five different portals.

Online ordering became a meaningful revenue stream and stayed one after dining rooms reopened. The business could meet customers where they were, and the operations team had a playbook for launching new channels without chaos.

More importantly, the pivot proved that Tractor could move fast without losing control. The same systems — tight menu integration, clear handoffs, daily visibility — became the foundation for later e-commerce and catering work.

Onboarding five partners at once created a lot of parallel work and duplicated menus. In retrospect, I would have launched with one or two, documented the exact setup steps, and then cloned the process. The speed mattered, but a reusable template would have saved hours and reduced errors.