You've heard about Soylent, no doubt. Beyond mere "health supplements" or diet fads that other drinkable meals have offered, the company has sought nothing less than to revolutionize eating. Producing “convenient, complete foods designed to provide maximum nutrition with minimal effort,” Soylent’s nutrient-rich beverages are distributed by an innovative subscription service that puts the product into the hands of customers who are such fans they’re willing to share their DNA sequences with the company in the interest of market research. (Read on to find out more about that.)

In this IT Visionaries, we talk to CTO John Coogan about how Soylent, with 46 employees (eight of them in IT), built a distribution system from the ground up with the help of App Cloud, how it maintains relationships with customers, and about whether Soylent is actually a food company or a tech startup.

1) How has your company designed Soylent to adapt to people’s changing habits — eating, commuting, and so on?

Time is of the essence, time is money, and customers don't want to have to get in their car, drive to the grocery store, buy a whole bunch of ingredients, go cook a meal. Soylent provides a convenient complete meal in a bottle and in a powder, so we're more efficient on that front. But we're also more efficient on the actual commerce side as well, in that placing an order online and having it shipped directly to you cuts out that entire grocery store experience, which can be time-consuming. We also offer a subscription for our products so that you don't have to go online on a monthly basis.

We're trying to make everything about our experience with our customers as seamless and easy as possible. I think for the modern consumer our shopping experiences are no longer held dear or seen as enjoyable. It's a chore for most people, I think — at least our customers.

2) Do you see Soylent as a tech company or a food company or a hybrid?

We're definitely a bit of a hybrid. We produce a food product. Everything about our company, from our approach to research and development on the ingredient side, to our current formulation, to scientists, to the software engineers that we have writing custom e-commerce software, sets us apart from nearly every other food company out there.

We are a food company, but we definitely have a different shape than most of the competitors out there and that's what gives us an edge. We're able to move faster, reach more customers. We were able to roll out our product nationally in a very short amount of time. We were able to grow extremely rapidly, and now we’ve shipped more than 25 million meals across the United States and Canada since May 2014. Being able to move quickly and scale to meet the burgeoning customer demand was really critical. We weren't really in a situation where we were seeing so much traffic that IT was really a pain point in that way. But there were definitely hurdles in terms of business intelligence, analytics, and just providing a quality customer experience at the scale that we were at.

3) As a company trying something pretty new, what’s your relationship with risk-taking?

We definitely strive to create a safe culture for innovation. If you have a company culture that doesn't celebrate failure or reward failure in a meaningful way you run the risk of stifling that innovation. Early on we were having a terrible time sending Excel sheets back and forth to our fulfillment center, which was very old-school. They hadn't really dealt with startups or any sort of tech company. We wanted to offer a vastly higher level of customer experience, sending people their tracking numbers, giving them updates on where things were. We just weren't able to get that information back from our fulfillment center.

What we did was to replace all of fulfillment center’s IT infrastructure, down to the actual internet connection. We brought a cellular-connected hotspot, a laptop, a printer, and hooked it all up so that we were able to print our packing labels and handle tracking and logistics data on our side; all they had to do was take the labels and slap them on boxes. Anyone in kind of a larger enterprise would see giving your entire system to this third party as a ridiculous risk, where you're no longer kind of in control of it. But it wound up working out really well for us and we were able to deliver a much higher level of customer experience.

4) How’d you start working with Salesforce?

We had previously been using an e-commerce platform for one-time business, but when customers wanted to subscribe to our product we would kick them over to this other platform. But we wanted to have a general concept of what an order is and not have that be tied to a specific system based on that customer's purchase intent.

Salesforce had partnered with our first investor, the startup incubator Y Combinator, which gave every new startup $100,000 in free Salesforce Heroku credits so that everyone in the incubator could use this great tool without real financial limitation and really experiment, see if they could get a company off the ground using this technology. It got nearly everyone in that community of startups familiar with Salesforce. Now, down the road, when these founders are making IT-purchasing decisions, obviously they have a ton of experience with Salesforce and they might not with other products.

5) What did you use Heroku to build?

We built a custom e-commerce platform on top of Heroku that handles both one-time orders and subscription orders all through this custom application that we built in Python and Django. The application handles when to bill the customer, where those charges get sent, and then extracts all of that into a single kind of order object that gets sent off to our warehouse fulfillment center to be automatically fulfilled. We've seen very steep improvements.

Since then, we've pushed a number of applications to Heroku, because everyone in the organization now is very familiar with the product and loves it and knows that it's reliable, easy to use, and affordable. I think other companies without Heroku wouldn't be able to deploy as frequently without a dedicated dev ops person or somebody really focused on IT infrastructure. We don't have anyone on staff that's primarily concerned with that. I think that's because of Heroku.

6) How do you create and maintain a relationship with your customer?

I think the e-commerce experience in general is very different than one you would have with a brand you buy at a large grocery store chain. The brand that you buy in the grocery store chain might be able to do some market research and learn a bit about you. They might poll a certain number of people, but really the depth of understanding that we can have with our customers is much deeper. We see that when we interact with our customers both through direct customer interaction on social media and customer support, and also through research. We engage our customers for all sorts of tests around new products, different expansion packs with different price points, and we see an incredible amount of feedback. That's been critical to the growth of our business and our decision-making.

We're also able to see how passionate our customers are about our product and about what they value in terms of health and nutrition. One of our earliest surveys asked customers if they would share information about their health and nutritional pattern to help us design the perfect food product. An enormous number of customers were willing to share their DNA sequences as well as their web metrics! We wound up not collecting that because it was unnecessary and probably risky from a regulatory perspective, but it just goes to show you how passionate customers are with a brand that they can interact with directly as opposed to through this intermediary of the grocery store or the retailer.

7) How do you think that the role of IT is going to change?

I think technology will be seen as more of a critical partner on a variety of projects. Every department will want to engage with somebody knowledgeable about the technical capabilities of the enterprise as early as possible in a project to really make sure that the initiative is a success. Understanding the technical possibilities for automating certain things within an initiative or leveraging interesting technology will be increasingly critical as more and more projects are built around digital experiences and necessarily require technology to be executed effectively.

I talk to a lot of technology leaders at food companies and I hear a lot of horror stories: "We were at half a billion dollars in revenue and we were still using Quickbooks or we were still using spreadsheets." I think that we have a grander vision for the company and if we want to avoid any of those kind of potholes in the road that can really slow you down, we need to have an intelligent IT strategy for the next few years as we continue to grow.

IT leaders have to adapt fast and choose their technology investments wisely. Read on to meet 12 more visionaries who are transforming their organizations.