Riceland Foods
Customer Stories
Background
Riceland Foods is a cooperative known as the world’s largest miller and marketer of rice. Riceland has 24 locations and is based out of Stuttgart, Arkansas. The company started working with Bushel in 2019, and currently utilizes uses several Bushel solutions including the customer portal, website management, and bid, offer, and hedge management.
The Opportunity
Riceland struggled with keeping their website up to date and easy to use. Additionally, Riceland and Bushel brought new opportunities to one another. With Riceland coming on board, Bushel added rice as a newly supported commodity. Riceland considered a handful of different companies as possible partners to help improve their digital offering to customers, and Bushel stood out because of their knowledge of the agricultural and tech industries.
“It was clear Bushel understood farming, which was helpful because we never find people who understand that,” Brian Smith, software manager, said.
“It’s really self-explanatory. As soon as you open it [Bushel’s customer portal] up, you find what you need to find. It comes real close to satisfying all the questions farmers have.”
Bill Free, Director of Farmer Relations, Riceland
The Solution
“Switching to Bushel was like upgrading to a car with all the latest features,” said Bill Free, director of farmer relations. Once fully integrated, Riceland’s struggles diminished. The platforms are now regularly and automatically updated, eliminating the tedious task of manual updates. “With Bushel, we’re on a constantly updated platform, which takes the headache off of us,” said Smith, highlighting how well Bushel maintains their systems.
The Results
In addition to their website, Riceland struggled with mailing out contracts.
“We were mailing a ton of stuff and then dealing with return mail. With the postal service’s reliability, we sometimes had to mail it twice. People were driving 20 miles to sign things. eSign in the customer portal has pretty much eliminated all that because everyone carries a phone and can sign on it,” said Free.
Now, with the up-to-date customer portal, customers can sign contracts anytime, anywhere. “Farmers really like having all their information in one spot,” Free added.
Smith noted the ease of use has contributed to the positive response and successful adoption by Riceland’s growers.