Gander - Find Reduced Food Near You

Gander is an innovative food-tech company based on the Isle of Man that integrates at POS level with retailers, capturing key events whenever reduced-to-clear (RTC) stock is created, sold, or wasted. With this data, Gander surfaces live reductions to consumers through multiple channels — their own web app, Olio, Google Shopping, and embeddable iframes on retailer websites.

But Gander's value extends beyond visibility. By collecting granular data on every reduction event, they provide a powerful analytics suite back to retailers, giving them a drilled-down view of their waste patterns and helping them boost sales on marked-down stock. With a strong focus on sustainability, Gander has established itself as a trusted name in the food industry.

As Gander's ambitions grew, they needed a technical partner who could do more than just write code — they needed someone to own the entire technical direction, manage their in-house development team, and work closely with retail partners to ensure seamless integrations.

Since 2023, Datrics has served as CTO for Gander, overseeing every element of their tech stack and working closely with their partners to ensure seamless workflows. We deliver high-quality software both through our own development efforts and through managing Gander's in-house development team.

Our engagement has spanned four major projects, each addressing a critical part of Gander's platform.

Consumer-Facing Web App

We built a best-in-class consumer web app so that end users can see live reduced-to-clear stock in stores near them. Using Next.js with a hybrid approach to rendering, we achieved rapid page load speeds for infrequently changing data like store details and locations through static rendering, while dynamically rendering the frequently updated RTC product listings.

The app features a custom-styled interactive Google Map so users can browse for stores or products near them through either a map experience or a list view. Designed for both mobile and desktop, the wider layouts take advantage of extra screen real estate while ensuring all core functionality is optimised for mobile — which makes up the majority of end-user traffic.

We integrated Mixpanel for analytics, building a rich picture of user behaviour and surfacing valuable data back to retailers on how many users viewed and interacted with their reductions. Alongside the web app, we also built a static marketing website in Next.js for instant page loads and SEO to reflect Gander's updated branding and direction.

Cloud Migration

This was a transformational project in which we migrated all of Gander's data and services away from a data center on the Isle of Man and into Google Cloud. Rather than a simple lift-and-shift, we re-architected core services to be cloud-native.

Key services that were previously long-running servers were converted into Google CloudRun containers, enabling them to dynamically scale to meet demand. At close of play — when most retailers are creating their reductions and traffic peaks — the services scale up automatically, then scale to near-zero overnight when stores are closed. Staging environment databases were made serverless, with only the production database always-on.

Before the migration, Gander had both their UK and Australian production environments stored in the same Isle of Man data center. For Australian end users, this meant a round-the-world trip for every request. Our migration to Google Cloud — combined with infrastructure-as-code tools like Terraform — made it straightforward to deploy all of Gander Australia's infrastructure in the Australian GCP region, putting their data close to their customers.

Gander Console and BigQuery

We completely revamped a legacy web application that served as the retailer-facing admin portal. In its place, we built Gander Console — a modern Next.js application using the latest UI best practices for data visualisation on the web.

The old system struggled with complex queries. A request like "show me all my RTC sales in the last 2 months" took a long time to load and led to significant user frustration. To solve this, we set up an Extract, Transform, Load (ETL) pipeline to take data out of the transactional MongoDB database and structure it inside BigQuery for big-data performance. With this in place, we were able to support any kind of query from the front end with near-instant data fetching.

Using the ReCharts library, we built a new suite of charts providing better insights and a delightful user experience for retailers. Beyond analytics, Gander Console is the central hub for retailers to manage everything — configuring their channels (Facebook, Google), adding and modifying stores, fine-grained user management, and compliance policies. Through iterative rounds of feedback, we reached a point where newly onboarded retailers can log in and manage everything they need to with no assistance.

Gander Go

Using React Native, we built a retailer-facing mobile application so that retailers who have not done a full POS API integration can still create reductions in-store. The app is typically loaded onto Sunmi Android devices which feature a built-in label printer, enabling retailers to create reductions manually, print their yellow stickers, reduce further, and mark items as sold or wasted as needed.

This is invaluable in trial scenarios where a retailer wants to test Gander without investing the time in building a POS integration. For smaller retailers with less traffic, it unlocks the ability to mark down stock and have reductions surfaced across all channels.

As Gander continues to grow, so do their technical challenges and ambitions. We continue to work closely with them across all stages — planning, architecting, and building — to ensure that their platform maintains its high standing in the food-tech space. With foundations laid for multi-region deployments and new retail partnerships on the horizon, the best is yet to come.