Connecting the essentials: How The Fruit Box Group built agility with Celigo

About The Fruit Box Group

The Fruit Box Group has been reviving Australian workplace tearooms for more than 20 years. With over 20,000 weekly deliveries nationwide, they supply fresh fruit, milk, coffee, and pantry essentials to businesses of all sizes. Their mission is simple: to take the complexity out of servicing office tearooms and bring great energy back into the workplace, one delivery at a time.

Challenge

The Fruit Box Group began a major digital transformation with a clear goal: give customers more self-service options and improve engagement, while keeping NetSuite firmly at the center of their operations.

For Peter Willmott, chief technology officer, this balance was critical. “The ERP is the brain of our business, but customising it is slow and expensive. We needed a way to connect new tools to NetSuite without losing control of our data,” Willmott explained.

The team wanted to integrate NetSuite with Adobe Commerce and Zendesk, along with other platforms that could improve customer experience. But they wanted to avoid heavy ERP customisations that were fragile, costly, and time-consuming.

Solution

The Fruit Box Group selected Celigo’s integration platform as the foundation for their digital transformation.

Several factors made Celigo stand out:

• Pre-built integrations: The team quickly connected Zendesk and NetSuite using Celigo’s off-the-shelf connector.
• Customisation options: Celigo gave the team flexibility to create a custom e-commerce integration, combining low-code configuration with the option to write custom scripts where needed.
• Speed and agility: New integrations with suppliers or external partners could be built and deployed in weeks, rather than months.

Willmott highlighted Celigo’s balance of simplicity and depth. “Celigo hits the sweet spot between pre-built and customisable. We can use what’s ready-made but also build exactly what we need without a big engineering team,” he said.

The Fruit Box team was even able to self-implement their integrations after completing standard Celigo training, relying on Celigo’s deep understanding of NetSuite to handle customisations automatically.

Results

Since adopting Celigo, The Fruit Box Group has transformed how their teams work and how they compete for new business:

• 80% reduction in manual customer service work: Automated processes free the customer service team to focus on retention, problem-solving, and proactive customer care.
• Accelerated sales cycles: The ability to build proof-of-concept integrations in days allows The Fruit Box to demonstrate technology capabilities during tenders and strategic pitches.
• More agile operations: IT can say “yes” to more requests, making quick fixes and quality-of-life improvements without the overhead of traditional ERP development.
• Lean, scalable integrations: With just two IT team members managing Celigo, the company maintains integrations that would typically require an entire development team.

“Celigo has been a key enabler of our whole company strategy. With a small team, we’ve built, maintained, and scaled integrations at a level that simply wouldn’t have been possible otherwise,” noted Willmott.

Looking ahead, The Fruit Box Group sees Celigo as a catalyst for continued growth. With confidence in their integration foundation, they can bring technology into sales discussions earlier, explore new partnerships, and open the door to more innovation.