Crafty is a leading national provider of office food and beverage programs, helping top workplaces elevate the employee experience. Powered by an innovative, centralized platform, Crafty delivers tailored, scalable pantry services designed to meet each client’s unique needs.
Software
201-1k
NA
Chicago
As Crafty scaled nationally, its lean product team needed deeper visibility into user behavior, faster ways to resolve friction, and a scalable approach to driving adoption without relying on engineering.
Crafty uses Pendo Analytics, Guides, Session Replay, AI, and the MCP server to understand user behavior, educate customers, troubleshoot issues, and automate reporting.
Crafty cut monthly reporting time by 99% and root-cause analysis from roughly four hours to as little as five minutes, freeing its team to focus on improving the product experience and strengthening its competitive advantage.
Four friends. One car. A mission to make office happy hours easier.
That was Crafty in 2015.
What started as a side hustle delivering drinks around Chicago has grown into one of the nation's leading workplace food and beverage providers, serving more than 300,000 employees each month across 750+ offices. Along the way, Crafty realized something important: Great snacks and coffee might get customers in the door, but great technology is what keeps them coming back.
Today, Crafty’s proprietary technology platform gives workplace teams one place to manage inventory, ordering, budgets, reporting, and employee engagement across offices. By combining nationwide service with a first-of-its-kind platform, Crafty delivers the visibility and control that set it apart from traditional office food service providers.
“We’re a workplace food and beverage company, but the technology underneath is what sets us apart,” said Allison Cuca, Vice President of Product at Crafty. “Our platform enables the entire program end to end, from ordering and fulfillment logistics to giving clients real-time control over their experience, so what looks like snacks and coffee is actually powered by a fully connected tech stack.”
As Crafty expanded nationally, the product team needed a way to better understand how customers were using its platform, launch new capabilities without slowing engineering, and quickly identify friction before it impacted the customer experience.
That's where Pendo came in.
When Cuca joined Crafty in 2022, the company was looking for more than product analytics. With a lean product and engineering team, Crafty needed a solution that could give product deeper visibility into how customers were using the platform and the autonomy to uncover those insights without relying on engineering.
Retroactive event tagging immediately stood out.
"We did not want to rely on an engineer to have every button and every page tagged. We wanted the product team to be able to manage that themselves, and free engineering for bigger tasks."
Allison Cuca, VP of Product, Crafty
Pendo checked that box.
Today, the product team uses Pendo Analytics every day to monitor feature adoption, understand user behavior, and identify friction across the platform. More recently, they've begun using Pendo's AI capabilities to uncover trends, generate account-level reports for customer success, and summarize insights that would otherwise require hours of manual analysis.
"My product team is in Pendo daily," Cuca said. "We're using Leo to reveal insights that aren't as clear by only looking at a dashboard."
When Crafty introduced new capabilities, product education wasn’t just a nice-to-have—it became essential. As the only business in its industry offering this type of technology, Crafty is introducing customers to capabilities they’ve never encountered before. Every new feature requires a deeper level of education to help customers understand its value, incorporate it into their workflows, and ultimately adopt it.
Pendo Guides became critical to making that education scalable.
The team uses Guides to introduce new capabilities, onboard new customers, and answer frequently asked questions through contextual tooltips—delivering education directly within the product, at the moment customers need it. They also leverage Embedded Guides to create experiences that look and feel native to the application. Instead of waiting for engineering resources, product managers can publish guidance in minutes.
"I think of Pendo as much more than an analytics platform," Cuca said. "Through its embedded Guides and targeting capabilities, it's become part of our go-to-market strategy."
Another common challenge that comes with growth is learning how to troubleshoot and resolve customer issues quickly, without that effort becoming too time-consuming. For Crafty, speed matters because delivering the best possible client experience means not only building a reliable platform and providing great service, but also getting ahead of issues and resolving them as quickly as possible.
Before Crafty started using Session Replay, diagnosing a complex bug often meant involving engineers to comb through logs and error reports. This process could take hours before the product team even understood what had happened, delaying both the diagnosis and the resolution for the client.
Session Replay changed that.
Now, an average client-submitted bug that once required approximately four hours to reach root-cause analysis takes between five and 30 minutes, helping the team respond faster and get clients back on track sooner.
Session Replay has also made a significant impact on how the team designs products.
Watching real customers navigate the platform often reveals behavior that analytics alone can't explain. Repeated back-and-forth navigation or hesitation between pages helps the Crafty team identify opportunities to simplify workflows and improve usability.
"Watching the clicks back and forth drives so much empathy," Cuca said. "It inspires us to think, 'Oh, I can make this so much easier for you.'"
With empathy leading the way, those qualitative insights have become an important input into Crafty's product roadmap.
For a lean team like Crafty’s, time is the most valuable resource there is, and one of the biggest time sinks was something every product team knows well: the monthly performance memo. Pulling numbers, cross-referencing dashboards, and writing up a narrative summary of how the platform performed used to take the Crafty product team about ten hours a month across the product team.
That changed when Crafty connected Pendo's MCP server to Claude.
Now, generating that same report is as simple as typing a single prompt: "Write my August report." What once took a full day of work now takes seconds, with Claude pulling live data directly through Pendo's MCP connector to assemble the memo automatically.
"We're not spending our time chasing what the result was anymore," Cuca said. "We're spending it on what the result means."
That shift has changed how the product team spends its month. Instead of reserving hours for manual reporting, the team now puts that time toward uncovering deeper friction points and brainstorming ways to actually influence the numbers going forward, turning a once-tedious reporting cycle into another source of product insight.
For Crafty's product organization, one of Pendo's biggest advantages isn't any single feature, it's how much product work the team can execute independently. .
Need to launch a new tooltip? Create an embedded banner? Collect customer feedback? Promote a seasonal marketplace collection? In many cases, the team can accomplish all of it inside Pendo without waiting for engineering resources or adding work to an already busy roadmap.
That speed allows engineers to stay focused on building differentiated products while product managers solve customer problems on their own.
"I'd tell any new Pendo customer to think about whether Pendo can solve it first before going to other departments," Cuca said. "It's a really powerful platform."
For a product team supporting a rapidly growing business, that's exactly the kind of leverage they're looking for.
From four friends delivering happy hours out of a single car to powering workplace experiences for hundreds of thousands of employees, Crafty has never stopped finding smarter ways to grow. With Pendo helping the team understand users, accelerate adoption, and continuously improve its platform, technology remains one of Crafty's strongest competitive advantages—and one more way it's helping companies craft better workplaces. Cheers!
