About the Project
Brizo Foodmetrics is a Quebec-based analytics platform built for people who live and breathe the restaurant business. Their team helps food service brands make smarter calls on where to open, what to offer, and how to grow by turning raw market data into something operators can actually use.
Our project focused on building a supply chain management system for their French-speaking Canadian team — a crew as energetic and competitive as their favorite hockey teams (think friendly rivalry between Canadiens and Nordiques fans).
Brizo’s mission is to equip restaurant chains with the intelligence they need to thrive, arming them with deep-dive data on competitor sales, franchise expansion, acquisition trends, and overall market health. They take complex, messy market data and turn it into clear, strategic power.
In short, the project was about helping restaurant chains keep up with a fast-moving market and giving Brizo’s team the tools to back every decision with data, not guesswork.
Client Request
Brizo Foodmetrics came to us with a clear problem: their internal system wasn’t keeping up with the amount of data flowing in from thousands of restaurants. Their existing tool was slow and clunky, making it hard for the team to see what was actually happening in the market. Visualizing and exploring data felt more like a chore than a daily workflow.
Brizo’s main goal was to replace this legacy system with a modern, high-performance admin panel. This new nerve center had to empower their core teams (analysts, salespeople, and managers) to interact with data faster, more efficiently, and without constant technical obstacles.
The mandate translated into these specific, high-priority technical requirements:
Build Lightweight & Fast: Develop an admin panel optimized for speed and low latency, ensuring a seamless experience for internal users handling dense data.
Optimize Large-Volume Workload: Create a system architecture to effectively process enormous datasets, which continue to grow from thousands of third-party restaurants.
Improve UX & Visual Layout: A complete redesign of the interface based on well-formed, modern UX principles, providing clarity and usability and turning complex data work into an intuitive, simple process.
Ensure Reliable Integration: Implement the flawless integration of the main Brizo platform into the system that provides guaranteed data consistency and real-time synchronization.
Prepare for Scalability: Build an architecture designed for future growth, with up-to-date readiness to support a full build solution that includes more robust features for future users.
Approach
Our team worked side by side with internal Brizo team members to co-create a solution to the speed and complexity issues they faced. Our work was built upon three fundamental principles: speed, credibility, and technical quality. The collaborations with Brizo's Head of Design and Head of Engineering produced a system that provides fast, secure, and enjoyable user experiences while simultaneously providing the ability to work quickly and effectively.
What we brought to the table:
Frontend development (React, TypeScript)
Backend development (Node.js, REST API)
UI/UX design and architectural review
QA, testing, and performance tuning
Product consulting and post-release technical support
Our team covered the full cycle: from product thinking and data architecture to backend logic and frontend performance. On the tech side, we built the interface with React and TypeScript, backed by a Node.js REST API. We used their existing design system as the foundation, then refined the UI based on real feedback from Brizo’s analysts, sales team, and leadership.
We adopted an Agile methodology with short delivery cycles and frequent, regular demos. This allowed us to maintain continuous feedback loops and rapidly iterate, ensuring the system evolved in step with the Brizo team's needs. Once the admin panel launched successfully and became part of their day-to-day workflows, we stayed on and joined the development of the main client-facing platform as well.
Tools We Used
To meet the high standards of speed, reliability, and future-proofing required by Brizo, we deployed a modern, robust, and scalable technology stack. This combination of tools ensured a lightweight front-end application, powerful back-end data handling, and streamlined delivery via efficient infrastructure.
Frontend: We built the interface with React and TypeScript, using Redux to keep complex data flows predictable and Tailwind CSS for fast, consistent styling that aligned with Brizo’s design system.
Backend: The backend runs on Node.js with Express.js, exposing a clean REST API and using PostgreSQL as the primary database to ensure large datasets remain reliable, structured, and easy to query.
Infrastructure: Everything is hosted on AWS, using EC2 for compute and S3 for storage. Docker and GitHub Actions handle CI/CD and deployments, so updates ship quickly without breaking the internal tools people rely on every day.
Integrations: The admin panel communicates directly with the Brizo Core System via REST APIs, making it easy to reuse existing logic and keep all internal tools aligned with the same source of truth.
QA: We used Cypress for end-to-end testing of key user flows and Postman for API testing, helping us catch issues early and keep the experience stable as the product evolved.
This selection of tools was strategic, designed to deliver not just a functioning admin panel but a foundational architecture that Brizo can effortlessly scale as it continues to grow its market presence.
Challenges
Building the new internal nerve center for Brizo was a demanding process, primarily due to the sheer scale of the data and the aggressive timeline. We tackled several interlocking challenges to deliver a system that was both fast and future-proof.
Scaling Massive Data Volumes
The core technical challenge was managing and optimizing massive streams of analytical data from thousands of restaurants. To ensure analysts could pull complex reports without latency, we had to meticulously fine-tune database queries and ensure the backend architecture could withstand the constant, heavy computational load.
Future-Proofing for Exponential Growth
The architecture required inherent scalability to support Brizo’s ambitious growth — specifically, the ability to handle data from tens of thousands of restaurants without requiring a system overhaul. This demanded strategic use of Docker and scalable AWS resources to support massive increases in data volume and user load.
Cross-Team Synchronization
Success required expert coordination across multiple internal Brizo teams (Design, Analytics, and Engineering). Aligning priorities and managing scope across departments required continuous communication and robust product consulting to ensure the final product met all stakeholder needs.
The Production Time Crunch
We operated under extremely tight deadlines, with only five months to production. This aggressive timeline necessitated a disciplined Agile workflow, rapid deployment via CI/CD, and prioritizing technical quality on the first pass to ensure a flawless, timely launch.
Core Features
The administrative panel we developed serves as the centralised control and intelligence hub for Brizo, moving beyond basic CRUD operations to provide powerful analytical tools that drive their clients' success.
Foundation & Administration
The platform's base delivers rock-solid data management capabilities, ensuring internal integrity and control:
Data Management (Full CRUD): Full Create, Read, Update, and Delete (CRUD) capability for all restaurant, franchise, and transaction data, ensuring the clients have accurate and complete control of their core assets.
Analytical Dashboards & Filtering: Intuitive dashboards built on a powerful filtering system enable internal users (analysts and managers) to manipulate vast amounts of data to derive relevant insights easily.
Roles & Access System: A fine-grained permission management system ensures that the correct teams are securely granted access to the appropriate levels of sensitive market data.
Seamless Core Integration: Real-time direct integration with the Brizo Foodmetrics Core database ensures that all analytics are derived from the most current and reliable data.
Customizable Market Visualization: Gives the ability to customize the way internal teams present complex market analytics through customized reporting and presentation formats that are designed for maximum impact.
Advanced Intelligence Modules
Beyond administration, the platform incorporates high-value intelligence modules that Brizo uses to empower client decision-making:
Competitor Intelligence: Users can actively monitor and track competitor movement, including real-time menu changes, new store openings, and critical pricing trends within specific markets.
Reputation Monitoring: The system aggregates online reviews and social media sentiment (leveraging the power of text analytics), helping brands understand overall customer feedback and quickly identify specific service issues across individual restaurant locations.
Market Research Tools: Provides executives with the capability to analyze key external indicators such as foot traffic patterns, detailed demographic trends, and regional demand to identify underserved markets and evaluate the potential of new site locations.
Opportunity Discovery: The platform uses smart comparisons between client menu offerings and broad consumer behavior data to pinpoint product gaps, flag trending items that should be adopted, and identify high-value cross-selling opportunities.
Results
The new system we’ve built was a crucial element in demonstrating Brizo's operational maturity and technical readiness, directly contributing to the successful outcome of their acquisition.
Here are the results we’ve achieved:
A fully integrated internal system: The new administrative platform plugged directly into Brizo’s existing ecosystem and internal processes, becoming the central workspace for operations, analytics, and partner management.
Faster, clearer data workflows: Data processing and validation sped up noticeably, and teams gained more transparency across key metrics — from restaurant performance to market trends and competitive activity.
Streamlined collaboration and analytics: Analysts, sales, and leadership could now work from the same live data, using shared dashboards and filters instead of ad hoc exports and one-off reports.
A strong platform for the company’s next chapter: After the project was completed and the platform matured, Brizo Foodmetrics was acquired by Datassential — a milestone that marked the successful exit of a fast-growing startup with a solid, scalable product at its core.
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