After using a legacy HR software provider for four years, Upper Crust Food Service hit a wall. The company—which serves fresh, daily meals to college fraternities and sororities across the US—was growing fast. But neverending manual work, combined with a lack of support from its HR provider, slowed its back office down. “We did everything we could with that system, but it lacked the automation capability for us,” said Melanie Meltzer, Upper Crust’s Senior Director of HR. “We were still running into gaps that wouldn’t support our growth. It didn’t seem like it would rise to the level of creating scalability in other parts of the business for us.”

Melanie asked her prior HR vendor’s support team to help her solve some of her biggest pain points—like integrating HR products with Google and other systems, automatically opening up new job requisitions if an employee gets terminated, or building headcount planning features. But, “never once did they take into account any of our feedback,” Melanie said. “We never got any of our products changed.”

The result of these limitations? “You spend a quarter million dollars on a system just to end up in spreadsheets.” Melanie’s HR team lived in them. She burned up to 20 hours a week managing a list of hundreds of chefs’ work locations and used a separate Google Sheets doc to manually manage salary benchmarking. And since most of Upper Crust’s employees work seasonally (aligned with the college school year), the HR team had to hire and rehire 1,000-plus people every year, which meant manually sending out individual offer letters. 

Upper Crust needed a change that could save the company time and help it grow. It wanted a system that could go beyond helping out with run-of-the-mill HR work and chip in with IT and finance problems, too. 

One platform caught Melanie’s eye.

Rippling stood out to Melanie as the lone all-in-one platform that was both easy to use and could give her hours of time back.

“We love Rippling,” Melanie said. “I’m so spoiled now.”

We’ve made a lot of strides building foundational systems like Rippling that allow us to grow.

Melanie Meltzer

Senior Director of HR at Upper Crust Food Service

According to Melanie, Upper Crust was lucky to switch to Rippling when it did. Shortly after, it acquired another company—it’s third in three years—and doubled its headcount from 1,100 to 2,200. That’s a huge stress test, and often a no-go, for most systems. Rippling made the sudden growth possible. “I’m so glad we implemented Rippling before that happened,” Melanie said. 

“It’s important we build a harmonious workforce with both companies merging together. We've made a lot of strides building foundational systems like Rippling that allow us to grow,” she said. “Growth and stability simultaneously is a very difficult thing to do, but we want both.” Rippling bridges the gap.

Apart from supporting 2,200 employees, Rippling meets the complicated demands of managing a seasonal workforce spread throughout 44 states. Most employees work in fraternity and sorority houses throughout the nine-month college school year, then technically “leave” the company, meaning Upper Crust has to rehire them and backfill roles for the employees who don’t come back. 

Rippling makes the once-dizzying process easy. She can automatically create Google accounts during onboarding and deactivate them during offboarding, instead of manually setting up email addresses for everyone the company hires and re-hires. The system also automatically sends locally-compliant offer letters to people, saving its HR team hours of busywork, and automatically creates new job requisitions when the company needs to backfill seats when people don’t return after the offseason.

“For us, the most important, coolest product Rippling offered was headcount planning. No one else had anything like it,” Melanie said, who finally got to ditch the dreaded spreadsheets. Instead of draining 20 hours a week manually checking employees’ work placements across hundreds of fraternity or sorority houses, she can now track work locations for everyone in an hour. The team can also pull in market data to set compensation bands—which account for employee performance, tenure, and market conditions—and use the platform to figure out how many headcount seats the company needs to fill at any given time.

“Having a place to maintain future seats that’s connected to recruiting and all these other pieces of the system is really huge for us,” Melanie said.

Rippling also helps Upper Crust comply with the different wage, employment, and tax laws throughout the 44 states its employees work. “Those default policies Rippling has, with the ability to set them by supergroup, is genius,” Melanie said. Instead of learning and memorizing meal and break laws, overtime rates, and sick time minimums everywhere, she can lean on Rippling’s pre-set, compliant policies. 

“For me, the automation is about us having more time to spend with our employees and less time to spend on looking up sick time laws in Colorado.”

Melanie found her prior HR provider’s UX clunky. Rippling’s is a different story. “It makes it a lot easier to communicate with employees,” she said. While people can be apprehensive when they have to use a new tool, “I didn’t have to sell people on Rippling. I’m like, ‘just sign in and let me know what you think.’ It sells itself… People bring it up randomly now. I'll be in a meeting, and they'll be like, 'by the way, Rippling's really cool.’ It makes me look good.”

It’s also a value add for employees, who get SSO’d into all their systems during onboarding. “It’s been a much more positive experience for them to have all the resources and passwords they need on their first day, instead of us having to piecemeal that between all the different departments,” Melanie said, adding that Upper Crust’s non-exempt employees have an easy time navigating the system. “It’s so simple and clean.”

After four years of asking her previous HR solution for help only to get stonewalled, Rippling changed the game. “I thought that Rippling was too good to be true when it promised it would care about my voice, but it clearly does,” Melanie said. “It’s been really wonderful to have a partnership.”

For instance, Melanie approached the support team about getting a search bar to help her toggle through information throughout the company’s 650 work locations. “The next day, the search bar was there,” she said.

It’s amazing that our feedback matters. Our experience is that Rippling seems to really care about making the product work for its clients.

Melanie Meltzer

Senior Director of HR at Upper Crust Food Service

• Time saved: Upper Crust saves 19 hours a week on headcount planning. 
• Cash saved: The company saved money by switching HR vendors and by keeping its back office headcount lean—even as it added 1,100 employees. 
• Headaches saved: Upper Crust kissed spreadsheets goodbye, automated busywork, and can lean on trusted support whenever needed.