At The Farmer's Dog we built a subscription based pet food management backend on Google Spreadsheets. Customers would sign up for a phone consultation on a Squarespace website, we'd then call them back and figure out their subscription details. These would be manually entered into a spreadsheet

The main sheet contained information about each customer and their subscription, e.g. pets, chosen recipes and subscription frequencies.

One sheet would dynamically populate what and how much we needed to cook for a given week by looking at active customers and their subscriptions. This was broken down per ingredient basis. We'd then place POs, cook and pack the food.

Another sheet would generate orders for the given week based on similar logic. We then used Google Spreadsheets scripting support to generate packing slips, customised feeding guides and food labels. Each asset type had its own Google Docs template. The script filled in the blanks and created a new folder. The resulting files were then exported as PDFs and passed to our fulfillment.

Oh, and we did our own deliveries in NYC too in the early days.

We've since built out our own ecommerce platform from the ground up and we continue to automate fulfillment, customisation and operational processes. Sounds exciting? We're hiring.