Why Freshly Cooks with Sentry

On the surface, food delivery service seems straightforward. However, creating a food delivery startup is more like building a transportation and logistics company than pizza delivery. Coordinating web and mobile applications for seamless ordering, tracking, and delivery, all within razor-thin service windows, takes an unprecedented level of complexity (when you get it right).

And once you begin to scale service, the technical challenges become even greater.

Enter Freshly.com, the New York-based company that ships over 800,000 meals a month. This means serious technical development to create a platform for customer experience, acquisition, and tracking. Combined with the fact that all the code needs to work seamlessly between web and mobile experiences, and you have a complex set of technical issues to manage.

This is why Freshly uses Sentry. If the code breaks, they need to solve the problem quickly and accurately. This isn’t just digital. This is real people missing their physical food orders. Sentry keeps Freshly code quality high, and the service running.

For Freshly’s engineering team, Sentry has become a vital part of the company’s development. “It’s just silly not to use an error monitoring service when running a modern web business — Sentry is one of our most important tools for root cause analysis,” said Matthew Hensrud, Engineering lead for Freshly customer acquisition. With 80 people on the entire engineering team, it’s vital to find the line of code that broke things as fast as possible. Matthew needs to assign resources appropriately to make sure the web app is working as intended and to identify the root cause of an issue before it begins to impact users.

It’s silly not to use an error monitoring tool like Sentry when running anything at scale.

Freshly uses Sentry primarily to resolve code issues. “There isn’t anything better for root cause analysis out there,” Matthew explained. Once an issue has been discovered, Sentry gives the team all the information they need to fix the problem and integrations with other services like Jira help them tie bug reports from Sentry back to actionable tickets.

There isn’t anything better for root cause analysis out there

Freshly recently migrated off another error monitoring tool, before switching to Sentry. The primary driving factor to move was to help reduce the time it took them to squash bugs. Prior to Sentry, it used to take the Freshly team days to resolve low occurrence issues. Today they can resolve those bugs in hours and critical bugs in seconds as opposed to minutes.

With all the time saved from not pouring through complicated console errors and logs, Freshly’s engineering teams are able to deliver a dependable digital service and thousands of healthy, prepared meals on time.