Case Study - Dessert Direct: From passion for patisserie to a scalable dessert concept

For Dessert Direct, Harmonizer implemented a robust B2B integration between their webshop and Exact Online, enabling orders to be processed, delivered, and invoiced automatically. Unlike previous complex projects, such as at QME, we completely rebuilt this integration with a focus on stability, maintainability, and transferability within the team.

A key part of the project involved cleaning up and aligning existing data between systems, which proved essential for reliable operation. Additionally, we implemented connections with the purchasing system Kovit and Pipedrive, ensuring that both order flows and customer insights are centrally available.

The result? A scalable and stable integration that instills confidence within the organization and forms the basis for further growth!

Dessert Direct ~ From passion for patisserie to a scalable dessert concept

Dessert Direct is a specialized catering wholesaler of pastry products. The company focuses on a key question from the hospitality industry: how do you serve very high-level desserts without relying on a pastry chef in the kitchen?

Founder Sjoerd Kroon van Diest comes from the kitchen himself and worked with pastry in beach pavilions for years. There, he saw firsthand how fragile dessert quality can be. As soon as the pastry chef is absent, the standard drops. Especially during peak times, quality can be difficult to guarantee and is, moreover, difficult to scale.

Sjoerd found the solution in mono desserts: ready-made main dessert elements that can be easily assembled straight from the freezer. These elements are made with great attention to quality, taste, texture, and presentation. By combining these desserts with fixed garnishes – sauces, crumbles, and decorations – Sjoerd developed a concept that allows any kitchen to serve a dessert of high pastry-quality in just a few steps. What started with seven desserts and twelve garnishes grew within a year and a half into an assortment of around 450 products, supplied to the hospitality industry throughout the Netherlands. That is tremendous growth!

We implemented integrations between WooCommerce, Exact Online, and Pipedrive, so that orders are now automatically transferred and processed. In practice, this has led to significant savings in time and money.

We spoke to Sjoerd about his experience with Harmonizer.

Rapid growth, but an increasingly heavy process

From the very start of Dessert Direct, Sjoerd wanted to set up the company professionally. He immediately invested in good systems such as Exact Online for administration, Pipedrive for sales, and WooCommerce for the webshop.

In practice, however, these systems operated independently: orders came in via the webshop, ended up in email, and were then manually typed into Exact. That worked fine when the volume of orders was still low, but it became increasingly unsustainable as the number of orders grew.

That limited sustainability lay not only in the amount of work but also in the logistics model. Dessert Direct operates production and storage in Belgium, with fixed cut-off times. Between 9 and approximately 11 a.m., all orders must be processed correctly to keep the logistics chain running. Manually retyping meant that there were sometimes only a few hours to process a large volume of orders without errors. It usually went well, but the workload was high and the margin for error became increasingly smaller. This was simply not sustainable in the long run.

The core question: how do we keep growing without getting stuck?

The core question became increasingly clear: how can Dessert Direct continue to grow without hiring extra people or relying on manual work?

Sjoerd wanted to spend his time on entrepreneurship, product development, and sales: not on IT, integrations, or order processing. At the same time, the solution had to be reliable, because the logistics chain leaves no room for delays. Through his network, Sjoerd came into contact with Harmonizer. What appealed to him was that we not only build integrations but take the entire process off his hands. We implemented integrations for Dessert Direct between WooCommerce and Exact Online, and later also with Pipedrive. Since then, orders flow automatically from the webshop to the administration, without manual intermediate steps.

What does the integration deliver in practice?

The impact of the integration was immediately noticeable to Sjoerd. On average, order processing now saves about four hours a day of manual work! Sjoerd uses that time for what he originally started out doing: building his company and focusing on sales. Financially, the integration also yielded significant benefits. Before the integration, manually processing orders meant nearly €2,000 per month in personnel costs, whereas the Harmonizer solution costs about €330 per month. A substantial cost saving, therefore, and also better conditions to handle more orders (and thus more profit!).

But perhaps even more important than time and money is the peace of mind the integrations provide. The morning peak stress is gone, and the team can now work in a more structured way, perform analyses at the customer and product level, and provide better support to sales.

About the collaboration with Harmonizer

The implementation itself was nerve-wracking for Dessert Direct, especially in the initial phase. After all, with tight cut-off times and complex logistics, every malfunction is urgent. Not everything ran smoothly from day one, and the first few weeks were therefore intense for Sjoerd.

What made the difference for Sjoerd was the way we handled it. “Problems were picked up quickly, communication was direct and personal, and when real issues arose, action was taken immediately,” says Sjoerd.

Would Sjoerd recommend Harmonizer? Sjoerd: “Yes, certainly. Especially within the hospitality and foodservice sectors. It is precisely there that many companies start small and idealistically, but later get bogged down in their own processes. Entrepreneurs lose too much time on internal tasks that could easily be automated. By outsourcing those processes, peace of mind, clarity, and room to do business are created.”