Jou Sun

Hong Kong's first online farmers' market. A zero-inventory, direct-from-source grocery marketplace aggregating 80–100+ farms and importers into a same-day-delivery operation—API-driven end to end, scaling 10× GMV over three years before Deliveroo acquired the company in 2023.

Role Co-founder / CTO / Full-stack Developer

Domain Food / Supply Chain / E-commerce

Focus Marketplace architecture, decoupled storefront, supplier / logistics / warehouse ops tooling, cold-chain fulfillment

Website jousun.com

Jou Sun e-commerce storefront showing fresh produce categories and featured products — The customer-facing storefront designed for quick reordering and product discovery

The Problem

Market Gap

Hong Kong's wet markets offer the freshest produce but operate during hours inconvenient for working professionals. The best quality food remained inaccessible to those who needed it most.

Supply Chain Complexity

Existing solutions lacked transparency. There was no centralized way to aggregate produce from fragmented local farms and markets while guaranteeing freshness and traceability across suppliers, logistics, warehouse, and delivery.

User Friction

Suppliers and logistics partners had varying levels of technical literacy, making complex digital tools a barrier to adoption rather than an enabler—especially in fast, physical pick-and-pack environments.

Visual representation of Hong Kong wet market challenges and supply chain fragmentation — The founding team of Jou Sun in Wan Chai (Hinz, Jessica and Chris)

Constraints & Considerations

Perishability & Cold-Chain — Three cold-chain zones (ambient, chilled, frozen) had to move through the same ops flow with temperature-aware packing, labeling, and handoffs to minimize spoilage. Labels carried product temperature so warehouse and last-mile could route items correctly.
Operational Speed — Warehouse sorting ran in a roughly three-hour window. Every extra scan improved traceability but slowed throughput—so scanning rules had to be configurable by site and staff maturity.
Provider Independence — Logistics partners and warehouses changed over time (roughly five to six warehouses during the business). Tools had to onboard and switch providers without rewriting core order logic.
Technical Adoption — Supplier, driver, and warehouse interfaces had to work for non-technical staff on mobile devices in noisy, high-pressure environments.

Role & Leadership

As CTO, I owned the technical vision and architecture for a high-scale marketplace platform through a multi-year growth trajectory, bridging core software architecture with day-to-day engineering operations.

Strategic Growth

Engineered a centralized Order Management (OM) platform that unified suppliers, third-party logistics, and CX workflows—so the same order truth could drive every app in the ecosystem as volume scaled. Peaked at 500 daily orders with SKUs growing from 1,000 to 3,000 and supplier network expanding to 50+ active partners (around 30% of which were fresh farms supplying vegetables and meats).

Core Architecture

Planned and implemented a high-performance marketplace stack with CodeIgniter (primary), Laravel (~20% of the stack for select services), PHP, MySQL, and PostgreSQL. An API-centric core powered the storefront and every operational application around it.

Decoupled Architecture

Isolated the customer-facing storefront from the operational backend with periodic data syncs—so traffic spikes and security incidents on the public surface had zero impact on time-critical fulfillment. The same decoupling let the company swap logistics providers, warehouses, and even re-platform internal apps without ever touching the storefront.

Frontend Stack

The public frontend was primarily jQuery. React was still early, so we adopted it only in small, high-value components—most notably a dropdown cart that updated dynamically as the user shopped on the current page, without a full reload. We also used React experimentally on lower-exposure admin screens to learn the stack before broader adoption.

Team Leadership

Co-led a hybrid founding team of seven across product, design, and engineering (three developers including one co-founder, two designers including one co-founder, plus a marketer and a finance/BD co-founder), introducing formal Agile ceremonies and structured operational processes to improve sprint predictability and delivery velocity.

Approach & Execution

We built an API-centric platform that drove the full ecosystem—from farmers, markets, and shops uploading and packing produce, through logistics and warehouse, to the shopper receiving their order. Each application shared the same order model and was designed around how that role actually worked on the ground.

Suppliers — Product Upload, Inventory & Picker Support

Shops uploaded products for the storefront while maintaining operational identifiers separately. Marketing-friendly names on the site often differed from the names and numbering staff used on the floor, so the system supported dual product language, SKUs, and picker-facing IDs without forcing one naming scheme onto the other.

Suppliers — Orders Pick & Pack

A mobile pick-and-pack app for next-day orders. Suppliers needed to pick by SKU and pack by SKU across ambient, fresh, and frozen lines. Label printing reduced mental load during packing—labels carried product temperature for downstream logistics and warehouse work. Staff marked picked, packed, and boxed counts, with scanner support to improve accuracy and throughput. End-to-end pick/pack time came down from roughly eight hours to three hours across the supplier network.

Logistics — Pickup Planner

A planning tool for each logistics provider's manager. Because we worked with multiple providers—and needed to onboard or switch them without breaking operations—the planner stayed provider-agnostic. Each day, managers saw pickup locations on a map and built routes. Efficient routing mattered in Hong Kong, where traffic heavily affects warehouse arrival times.

Logistics — Shop Pickup

Driver-facing app with per-driver login, assigned route, and pickup detail down to box, order, items, and pick completion. Logistics confirmed what was received; the system flagged missing pieces for confirmation with the shop. Box and item scanning was the default for accuracy. High-volume shops could override item-level picks when time was tight—accuracy was then reconciled at warehouse inbound.

Warehouse — Inbound

Confirmed handover from logistics pickup. Warehouse staff scanned box barcodes to verify inbound boxes before sorting began.

Warehouse — Order Sorting

Inbound arrived from multiple suppliers and had to be sorted into customer orders inside a tight window. Because warehouse partners changed often, the app was warehouse-independent. Order labels and configurable scanning modes (for example, item counts per open box) let us trade speed against traceability: more scans meant slower picks but better accountability, including down to the individual picker.

Logistics — Delivery Planner & Driver

Delivery planning mirrored pickup planning, but at the order level. Drivers saw their route and deliveries, scanned orders and completed drop-offs (including door drop confirmation), and could capture signature verification when required.

Customer Support — Missing Items & Delivery

CX had a bird's-eye view of the end-to-end chain. When an item went missing, support could usually see where it was lost, mispacked, or never packed—because each stage left a trail in the shared order system.

Supplier management interface showing product listings and inventory controls — Our key message of our service: Groceries Freshly Delivered

Mobile logistics application showing delivery routes and scanning interface — Highlighting one of our dedicated local suppliers

Outcome & Impact

Scale

Drove a roughly 10× growth trajectory over three years on a centralized OM platform that kept suppliers, logistics, warehouse, and CX on one operational spine. Peaked at 500 daily orders; SKUs grew from 1,000 to 3,000; supplier network expanded to 50+ active partners.

Market Leadership

Became Hong Kong's largest assortment of local farm produce for the platform's era, on a zero-inventory, direct-from-source, same-day-delivery model. Aggregated 80–100+ farms and importers with 100% supply-chain traceability—going to market as Hong Kong's first online farmers' market and remaining the category leader through the Deliveroo acquisition.

Acquisition Exit

Acquired by Deliveroo in 2023 to expand its grocery business in Hong Kong. The platform, the operations, and the team transitioned as part of the deal—a market exit that validated the architecture, the ops stack, and the supplier relationships we'd built.

Operational Traceability

Digitized the wet-market supply chain end to end—configurable scanning, temperature-aware labels, and stage-by-stage confirmation cut pick/pack time from 8 hours to 3 across the supplier network while reducing packing and delivery errors.

Team & Process

Co-led a hybrid founding team of seven (three developers, two designers, a marketer, and a finance/BD lead) with formal Agile ceremonies, improving delivery cadence while shipping a multi-app ecosystem that non-technical ops staff could actually use.

Recognition

Jou Sun's founding and growth were covered by South China Morning Post, Monocle, Hong Kong Economic Journal, The Standard, and HK01 between 2016 and 2022—independent validation of the model and the scale of the operation.

Visual representation of Jou Sun's impact and market leadership in Hong Kong's local produce market — The platform hosted the largest assortment of local farm produce in Hong Kong

Dashboard showing order management, inventory levels, and operational metrics — Operations dashboard providing visibility across the entire supply chain

Key Takeaway

In operational B2B systems, software has to follow the physical workflow—pick by SKU, pack by temperature, scan only as much as the stage can afford—rather than forcing farmers, drivers, and warehouse staff to adapt to complex tools.

Skills & Tools

CSS Mobile Responsiveness Performance Optimization Code Review CodeIgniter / PHP Architecture Laravel (select services) MySQL & PostgreSQL jQuery Frontend React (selective components) Decoupled / API-centric Architecture Order Management Systems Supply Chain Logic Cold-Chain Fulfillment (ambient / chilled / frozen) Mobile Ops Apps Barcode / Inventory Systems UX for Warehouse & Logistics Agile Team Leadership Cross-functional Team Building B2B Platform Architecture Zero-inventory Marketplace Model Direct-from-source Aggregation Same-day Delivery Operations

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