Riceland Foods

Who Riceland Foods is and why its members needed a feature back

Riceland Foods is a member cooperative, and riceland.coop is more than a brochure for it. The site carries real tools members rely on, including a dryer-camera page where they can check a location and see how busy it is right now. The Webflow site was originally built by another agency, and a year after launch Riceland's own marketing team was running it day to day. Kylie Dewberry, Director of Marketing and Communications, was hearing good things. Then members started asking about one small thing they had lost, and Collin Belt pointed Kylie our way: "I believe this functionality was handled by the Fri3nds team."

"Everyone's gotten a lot of good feedback on the site, and everyone seems to really enjoy it."
Kylie Dewberry, Director, Marketing & Communications, Riceland Foods

The challenge: a feature nobody knew they would miss

We started the way we always do, with a discovery call to align on goals and see the problem on screen. Members used to pick their dryer location once and forget about it. On the new site, every visit started from the same default location, Corning, no matter which one a member actually cared about. Nobody had written it down as a requirement, because on the old experience it simply happened. And the people asking for it back were the ones who matter most in a co-op: Riceland's board. Kylie was clear it didn't have to be live by the board's next meeting, but the ask had momentum.

"Every time it reloads, every time anyone gets in here, it just goes to Corning. So used to, you would just set it one time."
Kylie Dewberry, Director, Marketing & Communications, Riceland Foods

"We didn't really realize when we did this the first time. That that was functionality that they were going to be missing."
Kylie Dewberry, Director, Marketing & Communications, Riceland Foods

How we scoped and built camera favorites on Webflow

A small feature still deserves a real plan. Our proposal opened with a discovery phase on the camera data source, so there would be no surprises halfway through the build. Once Riceland signed, the work went onto one shared board and Terry and Nico took it from there. The idea was simple, the details were not: a star next to every location in the dryer-camera dropdown, starred locations rising to the top of the list, the favorite loading first on the next visit, and room for members who work with more than one location to star all of them. All of it had to live inside the Webflow site Riceland's team already knew how to run.

How we launched camera favorites

We built on staging first and shared the working feature with Riceland's team so they could review it on their own time. No big reveal, no long handoff. When the team gave the go-ahead, we released it to the live site a few days later. Members opening the camera page now see their own location first, not someone else's.

"This has been reviewed by our team and is ready to go live."
Kylie Dewberry, Director, Marketing & Communications, Riceland Foods

What changed for Riceland's team and members

For members, a repeat annoyance on a tool they check often is gone: set it once and stop thinking about it, exactly what Kylie described on our first call. For Riceland's marketing team, nothing about how they run the site had to change. They kept adding pages and updating content the way they already did, and the new feature simply sat inside it.

"We've added some new stuff to it and new pages and things, but they really set up a good flow for here's how you need to update things and setting up the templates and stuff. It's been great."
Kylie Dewberry, Director, Marketing & Communications, Riceland Foods

What happened after camera favorites

Riceland wasn't looking for a rebuild or a new agency. It wanted a focused team that could take a member request, scope it and ship it. After favorites went live, the co-op came back and signed a second SOW with Fri3nds for its next camera-page improvement, the next slice on the same shared board, now in progress.

• 2 SOWs signed with Fri3nds for riceland.coop camera-page features
• 5 weeks from signature to a member-requested feature live

Credits

• Client: Riceland Foods. Kylie Dewberry (Director, Marketing & Communications)
• Original riceland.coop Webflow site: another agency
• Camera favorites discovery, development and release: Fri3nds (Marcelo, Esteban, Terry, Nico)
• Services: Webflow development, custom Webflow feature build