How Crafty achieved 800% growth and seamless national scaling with Rippling

Meet Crafty

Founded in 2015 in Chicago, Crafty is a leading national provider of office food and beverage programmes including fully managed office pantry services. As companies continue to invest in the office as a destination, food and beverage has become a key lever for driving employee engagement, connection and overall workplace experience.  Crafty sits at the centre of that shift, helping companies like DraftKings, Robinhood and Zillow elevate the employee experience via tailored, scalable pantry solutions powered by a centralised, proprietary platform that enables real-time inventory tracking, budgeting and seamless multi-market operations at scale. 

What started as a keg delivery service run by four friends quickly evolved into a full-scale national pantry provider. Driven by a desire to redefine traditional food service, Crafty pioneered the industry’s first pantry management platform and scaled rapidly by leveraging a network of regional operators supported by its proprietary technology. This model fuelled major expansion – growing 800% in 2021 alone and scaling from 2 to 46 markets in just three years. Today, Crafty supports more than 450 client locations and employs more than 320 permanent employees across 27 US states. 

Managing that kind of growth demanded an HR system that could keep pace. Because when you’re operating across hundreds of client locations, systems don’t just support internal operations – they enable the team to deliver on their guiding principle of consistent, high-quality pantry experiences everywhere they go. Just as importantly, maintaining that scale meant delivering a consistent, high-quality workplace experience for clients regardless of location.

The Challenge

When Kristina Rothenberg joined as Director of Talent, Crafty was already on Rippling’s HRIS, but still using Greenhouse as its applicant tracking system. The disconnect between the two systems created real friction: moving a candidate from a signed offer letter to a hired employee in the HRIS required manually entering over 50 fields. There was no meaningful API to bridge the gap.

Onboarding wasn’t any smoother. Tasks lived in Asana, siloed from the rest of the process with no automation from offer to day one. And with a largely hourly workforce spread across 27 states, juggling state-specific compliance, background checks and document tracking manually just wasn’t sustainable.

The Solution

Crafty’s rapid expansion made one thing clear: their internal systems needed to scale as seamlessly as their external operations. Kristina had used Rippling at a previous company and knew consolidating onto a single platform was the right move. When Crafty’s Greenhouse contract came up for renewal, she made the case internally using both efficiency gains and cost savings to get leadership on board. Rippling matched Greenhouse’s offer and removed the implementation fee, making the decision straightforward. For Crafty, saving time was just as important as building infrastructure that wouldn’t break as the business continued to scale.

One system from ATS to HRIS

Moving recruiting onto Rippling eliminated the manual re-entry of new recruit data entirely. What had previously required 50+ fields of manual input now flows automatically from the applicant tracking system into the HRIS – centralising complexity the same way Crafty approaches its own platform, to create a more seamless experience at scale.

Automated onboarding task lists

Crafty replaced Asana with Rippling’s built-in task lists, giving the team a single, automated workflow from offer letter to a new recruit’s first day. Rippling also acted on customer feedback during this time – adding the ability to send and sign offer letters before formally hiring someone into the system, removing an additional step from the process. The result internally reflects what Crafty already delivers to its clients: structured workflows that ensure consistency across teams and markets.

Background checks on autopilot

Through the Checkr integration, background checks are triggered and returned automatically – no manual launching, no manual follow-up.

Open enrolment without the stress

Crafty works with Sequoia as their benefits broker. Rippling coordinated directly with Sequoia to build out the open enrolment module, and Kristina’s job was simply to review and confirm. “Launching open enrolment was the easiest part of owning benefits,” she said – an outcome she hadn’t expected given how often she’d been warned otherwise.

Document management at scale

Rippling’s document tools let Kristina upload the company handbook, distribute it to all 320+ employees for signature, and track completion – all from one place. Once uploaded, the document can be attached to offer letters for future new recruits to sign during onboarding.

Compliance 360 for a complex workforce

With California’s strict meal break laws and a workforce clocking in and out across multiple states, Rippling’s Compliance 360 feature flags violations automatically – giving managers the ability to review, edit time cards and resolve issues directly. Crafty is currently piloting geolocation-based clock-in in Chicago, with plans to roll it out to all markets once validated.

The Impact

Crafty went from a manual, multi-system HR operation to a unified platform that scales with them. The team eliminated the back-and-forth between their applicant tracking system and HRIS, replaced Asana with native onboarding automation, and now manages compliance, background checks and benefits enrolment with significantly less lift – all while doubling headcount in two years. This operational foundation has been critical in supporting Crafty’s growth across 46 markets, enabling the team to deliver consistent, high-quality office pantry services and managed workplace food programmes at a national scale.

With a unified system in place, Crafty is now positioned to continue expanding as a national pantry provider, while maintaining operational consistency and delivering a best-in-class workplace experience across every market, every client and every office they serve.