How RAPS Spiced Up the German Butcher’s Trade

(a) Situation faced: RAPS is a German spice manufacturer offering various top quality products to customers worldwide. Organized in three business segments, RAPS supplies large companies in the food production sector, caterers and restaurants, and the butcher’s trade and food retail sector. Especially the butchers, one of the most loyal target groups of RAPS, face current challenges. Strong market consolidation due to the approaching food retail sector and increasing regulatory requirements are but a few examples. Addressing these challenges, RAPS pursued the following project mission: Leveraging digitalization’s potential to expand RAPS’ value proposition, to differentiate from competitors, and to increase market share in the butcher’s trade. (b) Action taken: In a joint project with the Project Group Business & Information Systems Engineering of the Fraunhofer FIT, RAPS devised, developed, and launched new digital services that specifically address the butcher trades’ main challenges. In a customer-centric approach, butchers were included in the entire process. Starting with the identification of challenges, they tested and evaluated concepts and prototypes in various developmental stages. The new digital services, subsumed under the platform-independent application myRAzept, now support hundreds of RAPS customers in a formerly rather non-digital industry regarding food information labeling, recipe management and planning, and order management. (c) Results achieved: The project team achieved several notable results: By providing an intuitive and useful platform-independent web application, RAPS expanded its service portfolio for an important group of customers. The image of RAPS as an innovative company was improved. The project did not only delight customers and externals stakeholders but also the employees of RAPS. Due to the project’s positive spirit, the collaboration between different parts of the company was further improved. Additionally, the project’s scope matches perfectly with the efforts of the Adalbert-Raps-Stiftung as a charitable foundation and silent partner of RAPS. (d) Lessons learned: The project revealed a variety of lessons learned that might help others when implementing digitalization projects in small- and medium-sized businesses, especially in the food industry. When introducing digital services to a traditional non-digital industry, the potential users’ digital readiness must be considered. Incumbents’ value propositions regarding quality in the physical world need to be transferred to digital services to maintain customer trust. Thereby, the integration of customers’ opinions, wishes, and requests is extremely valuable. Further, providing digital services to customers requires the development of digital capabilities within the company.