Case Study: ZeroCater launches an on-demand catering marketplace and accelerates growth with Heroku

Catering Service Expands their Business with an Online Marketplace on Heroku

ZeroCater, a corporate catering company founded in 2009, wanted to grow its on‑demand, self‑service business by building a marketplace to connect local caterers with customers. Their legacy Python monolith on custom AWS infrastructure was hard to change and maintain, so they needed to transition their business model, operations, and technology platform to support fast iteration and scale.

They moved new development to Heroku, migrated their production database to Heroku Postgres, rebuilt the front end with React/Node, and are replatforming piece‑by‑piece into microservices while using Heroku Add‑ons, Pipelines, and Teams. The change cut infrastructure overhead, sped up testing and deployment, stabilized their database, enabled rapid MVP testing, and let engineers focus on product features—supporting a growing marketplace and more opportunities for catering partners.

ZeroCater

Rob Adams

Engineering Manager