A 36-year-old exporter, rebuilt around one system

Arabian Food Corp is a food export business in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, trading for 36 years. In 2019 they approached us for a brochure — nothing more. The brief was precise: it had to look highly professional to their export peers, and it had to be sophisticated without being fashionable. These are buyers who have been in the trade for decades and can tell the difference between a serious counterparty and a new website.

A company trading successfully for 36 years carries process that works, and the risk in any modernisation is that you break something nobody documented.

The first challenge was presentational: look current to international buyers without implying the business had reinvented itself. Export is a relationship trade and the existing relationships were the asset.

The harder problem came later. As the work extended from the brochure into the website, the mobile apps and eventually the ERP, we were replacing established internal process — purchasing, inventory, order handling, third-party services the business already depended on — while trade kept moving. There is no quiet period in food export to do that in.

We earned the scope one piece at a time rather than proposing a transformation.

The brochure came first and established the visual language. When the client was satisfied, the website extended that language for an export audience, structured around what an international buyer actually needs to establish before making contact.

The mobile apps followed, bringing ordering to customers directly. The ERP came last and deliberately so — we only modelled the operation after we understood it, which took working alongside it. It integrates the third-party services already in use rather than demanding the business abandon them, and it went in incrementally so no single cutover could stop trading.

Arabian Food Corp’s public presence and internal operations now run on systems we built. The apps have passed 10,000 downloads and the platform has processed more than 30,000 orders. The engagement has been continuous since 2019: what began as one brochure is now the backbone of the company’s daily trading.

We are still working across this account. A brochure became a website, then apps, then an ERP, over six years — and each step happened because the previous one worked, not because it was sold.

This engagement spans web, mobile and a custom ERP built around an existing operation. Read more about how we approach web and platform development, or see the rest of our work.