About Crafty
Creating smarter pantry programs for the modern workplace
Crafty started with happy hour beer deliveries in a borrowed Cadillac. A decade later, the Chicago-born company runs food and beverage programs for 750+ offices and serves more than 300,000 employees every month at companies like DraftKings, Robinhood, and Zillow.
Crafty pairs great food with an operating model that delivers it at scale. By combining hospitality, operations, and technology, Crafty helps organizations deliver better workplace experiences through managed pantry, coffee, and food programs. Behind the scenes, Crafty’s platform gives workplace teams real-time visibility into inventory, employee preferences, budgets, and service operations, making it easier to optimize every location at scale.
“Slack brings together our operations, with channels for every client and department, and it helps connect our people beyond the workday.”
The challenge
Running a hospitality-grade service operation across 750+ client offices
Crafty’s work happens in offices, pantries, loading docks, client sites, and everywhere in between. Managing 750+ locations at once means coordinating field teams, supply chains, warehouse partners, and client service standards in real time, a challenge most software was not built to handle. Direct supply chains, warehouses, and market partners all support the client experience, so communication is critical.
As Crafty scaled, the margin for error got narrower. In an industry where service failures are visible in real time, an empty pantry shelf, a missed delivery, or a missing item on an order can affect the client experience quickly. Crafty needed the right person to know early enough to find a substitute, update the client, or fix the issue before it escalated. The same need for faster, more visible coordination showed up across the business. IT requests arrived through scattered emails. Marketing shared campaign updates, social posts, launches, and Tableau insights with a dispersed team. Operations coordinated call-outs and daily orders with people who were often away from a desk. Office admins manually managed recurring reminders and cadenced messages.
Crafty needed an operating system that could hold together a workforce split between loading docks, pantry floors, and client offices, and keep service quality consistent across 750+ locations at once.
“We’ve moved from reactive-by-default to proactive-by-design, and Slack is the connective tissue that makes it possible.”
How Crafty works better with Slack
Connecting the teams, clients, partners, and systems behind every pantry
Before they even had an official email domain, Crafty relied on Slack. “We’ve been using Slack since the beginning,” said CTO and Co-Founder Jimmy Paul. “Slack was the first tool we downloaded. We just started opening channels and discussing this idea.”
That early strategy laid the foundation for how Crafty works internally. Today, every department, market, and team has a place to coordinate, while channels like #parents-of-crafty, #pets-of-crafty, and #questionoftheday create space for employees to get to know one another, celebrate shared interests, and strengthen an inclusive culture.
As more clients brought their own work into Slack, Crafty extended that operating model outward. The company now uses Slack Connect with clients and partners, giving account teams, operations, and external stakeholders a shared place to coordinate the details that keep pantry programs running.
Building one Slack integration for two audiences
With employees and clients already working in Slack, Crafty saw an opportunity to build more of its service model into that shared environment. “In a Pendo poll, 41 clients reported using Slack, compared with 16 using Microsoft Teams,” said Paul. “As one client put it, ‘99% of our communication, internally and externally, is Slack.’ That insight pushed us to build the Crafty Slack integration: one intelligent system, two audiences.”
The integration delivers:
- Core alerts to Crafty’s internal ops, field, and partner teams (including “Shift Not Started,” “Proof-of-Delivery Not Submitted,” and “Can’t Pick”)
- Platform alerts to the 75% of clients already in Slack (including Slack-exclusive two-hour cutoff alerts, delivery confirmation alerts, and back-in-stock notifications)
For Director of Client Experience Emma Waterman, the shift is felt most in how the team resolves issues. “Slack has moved operational coordination and client interactions out of slower email threads and into real-time channels, enabling faster resolution and clearer handoffs,” she said.
The 30-Minute Advantage: Engineering proactive service into the platform
Crafty connected its teams in Slack — and redesigned its service model around it. “The synergy is in the intentional sequencing between the two layers, what we call the ‘30-Minute Advantage,’” said Senior Product Manager Kelley Gessner. When an order is missing items, Crafty’s internal team receives an alert immediately. The client alert goes out 30 minutes later, giving ops time to source a substitute, update the order, or get ahead of the conversation. “That’s a culturally significant shift,” said Paul.
Delivering better workplaces starts in the field
Unlike traditional SaaS companies, Crafty’s work doesn’t solely happen behind desks. Every day, hundreds of employees are stocking pantries, receiving deliveries, setting up events, resolving client requests, and serving workplaces across North America. That makes mobile communication mission-critical.
“Our field ops, delivery supervisors, location managers, and supply chain specialists need alerts in their pocket, not buried in an inbox they’ll check hours later.”
“Our field ops, delivery supervisors, location managers, and supply chain specialists need alerts in their pocket, not buried in an inbox they’ll check hours later,” said Gessner.
Rather than pulling employees away from clients or forcing them back to a laptop, Slack keeps critical information where the work is happening. Teams receive delivery updates, respond to call-outs, coordinate substitutions, and resolve issues in real time from anywhere. That immediacy translates directly into a better client experience.
“Mobile usage is critical,” says Waterman. “Our on-site and delivery teams rely on Slack to communicate with one another and their managers. It keeps teams responsive when they’re away from a desk.”
For Food & Beverage Supervisor Megan Pullos, Slack mobile means she can stay alongside her team instead of stepping away to manage communication. “I use Slack on my phone because I need to be on the floor,” she said. “Mobile matters because I can quickly connect with my team without having to stop what I’m doing and grab my laptop.” For her Spanish-speaking team, Slack’s translation feature adds another layer of support. She can communicate across a language barrier from the floor without stopping to find a laptop.
Every minute an on-site employee spends walking back to a laptop is a minute they’re not serving a client.
For clients, Slack alerts lead straight to action. From a push notification, an admin can submit an order, edit it, shop for replacements, check a budget, or open the exact page in Crafty that needs attention. Crafty designed these one-tap actions to mitigate the “tap tax”: the friction of switching between tools. “By integrating in Slack, we’ve removed some of that tap tax, and everything is right where the team is already working,” said Paul.
Making requests, reminders, and decisions easier to manage
With Slack workflows, Crafty turns clunky everyday handoffs into clear, trackable processes. For example, IT Support Specialist Xzavier Lee built a request form that automatically feeds from the #general-IT channel into a Slack list where he can easily manage everything. Crafty has since mirrored that model for both equipment and data requests.
To keep ownership visible and speed up decisions, workflow reminders and app notifications surface action items in the right channels, while huddles give teams a quick way to check in, share screens, and resolve questions without long email threads. Lightweight voting in channels helps teams align when a decision needs input from more than one person.
For Executive Assistant Halle Hutchinson, workflows transformed her daily routine. “So much of my role used to involve sending reminders and managing cadenced messages,” she said. “Now, Slack workflows handle that admin so I can focus on more meaningful projects.”
Marketing uses Slack channels as a live workspace
Crafty’s marketing team must work quickly, and from anywhere. “Our content involves live events, client visits, social engagement, content capture, and reactive moments tied to trends or news cycles,” said Amber Nicole Alston, Senior Brand and Content Marketing Manager. “Slack mobile allows us to stay responsive, keep projects moving, approve content on the go, and jump into conversations in real time without bottlenecks.”
The team also uses Slack to keep cross-functional work visible across creative, sales, product, client experience, and leadership stakeholders. “Slack helps work feel more connected, and a lot of our best ideas and fastest decisions happen in-channel,” said Alston.
Growth Marketing Manager Rebecca Ross uses the Asana integration to turn Slack feedback into tracked work. “I get a lot of requests and feedback in Slack,” she said. “I’m constantly using Asana in Slack so I don’t forget them.”
Ross also shares Tableau insights with marketing before new content goes live, and with sales when the team needs benchmarks or product trends. “Slack is one of the team’s primary ways to distribute dashboards, engagement metrics, campaign performance, and social insights internally,” said Alston.
“For marketing, Slack helps turn data into conversation. Instead of insights living in a dashboard no one checks, they become part of active decision-making and iteration.”
What’s next
Building the global workplace platform
“We’ve always gone where our clients take us,” Paul said. Crafty’s next chapter will bring more markets and a fundamentally different operating scale. Teams will need multilingual communication, local-currency reporting, and faster access to trusted knowledge across documents, dashboards, and operational data. Slack is the connective layer that makes that growth manageable without sacrificing Crafty’s service quality.
Teams already use Notion AI, Fathom, HubSpot, Tableau, and Google Drive in Slack, giving employees one place to start when they need information. Tableau Pulse is helping the team forecast trends, and Paul sees more opportunity to bring real-time data into Slack so employees can ask better questions and act faster.
For Paul, AI is what makes that scale manageable. “Slack is where folks can get answers to any question, whether that’s qualitative or quantitative,” he said. “You need to be able to speak with a database, and AI makes that possible.”
The destination: one platform for clients, partners, and snack brands with Slack as the global connector. “Slack is an essential user interface and part of this larger ecosystem,” said Paul. It’s the same model Crafty has always run, bringing together hospitality, operations, and technology, just at a scale that original borrowed Cadillac couldn’t have imagined.
