Truffle Shuffle cooks up a new business model supported by DocuSign eSignature

Three alumni of the famed restaurant, The French Laundry,  founded Truffle Shuffle to provide customers with fresh, consciously sourced, traceable truffles as well as small-batch truffle products. Since its inception, Truffle Shuffle has imported and sold truffles directly to restaurants in the San Francisco Bay Area and across the country.

But when COVID-19 forced restaurants in California to close, Truffle Shuffle immediately lost 80 percent of its business. This farm-to-table food provider adapted and created entirely new services and technology to deliver restaurant-level dining right to customers’ kitchens. Truffle Shuffle launched an ongoing series of “Live Cook-Along-Experiences” with pre-portioned ingredients sent to guests. Each experience culminated in a live class focusing on classic cooking technique in a fun, relaxed, virtual setting.

“Truffle Shuffle is an interactive cooking class experience,” explains Jason McKinney, CEO and Founder. “We send you all the ingredients you need to make the same dishes that we learned cooking at some of the best restaurants in the world.”

The Truffle Shuffle team leaned on technology to make the shift to digital experiences. They knew they couldn’t work without electronic signature technology—so they turned to their trusted DocuSign eSignature platform.

Easy-to-use digital tools make it easy to scale up the business

Truffle Shuffle’s new digital business model created the need for a vast amount of paperwork. The shift meant the company had to establish and maintain supplier contracts with hundreds of Whole Foods locations across the country and create virtual event agreements for organizations that hired Truffle Shuffle to host their corporate events. Prior to their shift, Truffle Shuffle used Quickbooks for restaurant invoices and DocuSign eSignature for new hire paperwork and supplier contracts, but they quickly became a staple. For a small company led by chefs who had little contract and accounting experience, eSignature and QuickBooks made these processes simple, straightforward, and scalable.

To manage agreements with organizations interested in hosting cooking classes, Truffle Shuffle creates and individualizes contracts within DocuSign eSignature. The company then sends contracts to customers and receives a digital signature quickly, often within minutes. In 2020 alone, Truffle Shuffle hosted more than 80,000 customers across the United States.

“Every single corporate event we do begins with a DocuSign signature,” explains McKinney. “When we start talking to a client, we want to streamline the event booking process by getting them to sign that document as quickly as possible, and from wherever we are in the world, so that we can put our full attention on that experience. When we send it to them, they open it, sign it, send it back, and within minutes, we’re able to get these events booked.”

Less time on paperwork means more time for growing the business

Truffle Shuffle’s use of DocuSign grew exponentially in 2020. Even as the post-pandemic world opens up, the company won’t be returning to paper contracts and manual processes. Supporting more than 20 private events per week, Truffle Shuffle’s busy chefs use DocuSign eSignature to streamline the event booking process while they’re on-the-go.

 “Saving time allows me to continue running the business,” McKinney concludes. “The more time I can free up to make sure we’re successful here, the more grateful I am to DocuSign.”

Even as restaurants reopen, Truffle Shuffle plans to keep its virtual classes going and will continue scaling its business thanks to digital tools such as DocuSign eSignature. What’s Truffle Shuffle’s biggest takeaway? Work dynamically and embrace change.

With its business booming, Truffle Shuffle has grown its team from 3 to 26 employees, using DocuSign eSignature to onboard them. The company relies on DocuSign to streamline manual processes and let chefs focus on creating the best experience possible for their customers.

“We use DocuSign for our NDAs and employee contracts,” says McKinney. “Every time we get a document signed it means we’re growing the business, it means more money’s going into the bank, it means we have an opportunity to make guests unbelievably happy.”