Case Study: Gousto achieves near-real-time fulfillment and 60% infrastructure cost savings with Databricks

Streamlining food delivery fulfillment to delight customers

Gousto, a UK recipe-box and food-delivery company that puts data at the center of its service, faced a scaling crisis when COVID-19 demand surged—doubling deliveries to 5 million meals a month. Legacy ETL and siloed warehouse systems meant data ingestion took hours (and often failed), obscuring real-time inventory and pick-line status, limiting throughput, hurting on‑time-in‑full performance, and forcing Gousto to pause new customer sign-ups.

By adopting the Databricks Lakehouse on AWS with Delta Lake and streaming CDC, Gousto unified pick‑station and warehouse data into near real‑time Delta tables, cut end‑to‑end ingestion from two hours to 15 seconds and data prep from three hours to five minutes, and moved to a 100% streaming ETL stack with no failures. The platform reduced infrastructure costs by about 60%, delivered a 40% productivity uplift for data engineering, improved OTIF and planning, and positioned Gousto to expand fulfillment capacity and pursue personalization and next‑day delivery.

Gousto

Shaun Pearce

Chief Technology Officer