Customer Success Story

My Muscle Chef hits wireless fitness goals

Eating healthy while juggling busy work days and long workouts is no easy feat. Whether an elite or amateur athlete, a serious gym goer, or a fitness enthusiast, it can be a struggle to fit everything into the day and a strong support system is needed to maintain good habits and achieve goals.

In Australia, My Muscle Chef offers high-quality, protein-packed fresh ready meals paired with accessibility and convenience. The family-run business delivers over 2 million meals, snacks, and drinks per month direct to consumers and to a network of 5,000+ retail stockists, so that every day Aussies can focus on reaching their fitness and lifestyle goals.

Founded in 2013, the company has added lots of lean, strong muscle in its first decade. It offers more than a hundred meal, snack, soup, and drink options, while the three-person kitchen has grown to a 500-strong team working in a high-producing, award-winning manufacturing facility.

As the business scaled and met its growth goals, its wireless network lagged behind. My Muscle Chef sought a new network solution with the most advanced, intelligent technology available. Employees worked too hard to deal with poor Wi-Fi performance, says John Khoury, Head of Technology and Change Management at the company, and IT leadership wanted a network that supported automation and IoT, and supported security across the business.

Company	My Muscle Chef
Industry	Manufacturing
Products used	AP32, AP63, EX2300, EX3400, SRX340
Region	APAC

Customer Success At-a-glance

Staff at headquarters site in Yennora, Western Sydney

Digital experience maintained for business-critical data apps, voice, and video due to network segmentation

Logged network-related trouble tickets with Juniper and Mist AI

To resolve a video performance problem using AIOps

Challenge

Shrink sprawl and reduce complexity

My Muscle Chef invested in a $55 million state-of-the art manufacturing and logistics facility in Western Sydney to expand its operations and support its success. The 10,000-square-meter building would allow the company to double production of fresh meals. The executive team wanted IT and networking technology to support business growth.

“We wanted to be future-ready with automation in manufacturing and the warehouse, and we see potential for IoT with environmental controls, scales, and preventive maintenance,” says Khoury.

Lack of visibility was an issue plaguing the company’s existing network. My Muscle Chef wanted to see issues at the app, device, and network level, and then have intelligent tools to help staff quickly troubleshoot and resolve them.

The meal provider already used cloud-based business applications and wanted a network that was also cloud-managed. IoT was also part of the plan.

“We needed a secure network solution for our new state-of-the-art facility and allow future scalability growth”. he says. “With Juniper, we gained security, AI, and the operational simplicity of our IT networking management.”

Solution

Deploy a fit network trained for the future

My Muscle Chef consolidated three sites into its new headquarters and rolled out the full stack of Juniper wireless, wired, and security.

Juniper Networks AP32 Access Points provide Wi-Fi 6 in its new facility and other offices, while Juniper AP63 Access Points cover the outdoor areas with Wi-Fi. Juniper Networks EX Series Switches are used at the core and access layers. Juniper Networks SRX340 Firewall provides LAN and WAN connectivity, and next-generation security services.

Mist AI delivers insight and automation. Juniper Networks Marvis Virtual Network Assistant assists staff with troubleshooting and AI-driven actions to keep the network healthy and deliver excellent user experiences. “Self-healing and AI capabilities are necessities for a modern network,” says Khoury.

“We now have a secure network that securely separates production, warehouse, office, guests, and voice traffic,” says Khoury. “Security, segmentation, and traffic prioritization are why we chose Juniper.”

Outcome

Fire-drill free, full-stack network

Once the Juniper network was deployed, Wi-Fi performance improved significantly, the help desk stopped logging network-related support tickets, and IT staff could conduct remote troubleshooting.

Marvis helps IT staff solve problems before they impact user experiences. In online meetings, for example, video was freezing due to bandwidth saturation. “We used Marvis to quickly troubleshoot, then proactively addressed the problem by allocating bandwidth to every IP address,” says Khoury. “Since that change, the network experience has been fantastic.”

Resolving the video issue was faster than anyone imagined it would be. “Before, it might have taken several weeks to find a resolution, but with Marvis and Mist AI, we resolved it within 24 hours,” Khoury says.

The network also got a boost from 5G back-up capabilities of the SRX firewall, in case the primary WAN link goes down. “We prepare meals 24 hours a day, so we can’t tolerate a fiber cut or other disruptions to the network,” says Khoury. “The automatic WAN failover on the SRX minimizes the risk of outages.”

The new network is ready for My Muscle Chef to migrate to new customer relationship management and enterprise resource planning systems as it works to double meal production. The advanced security capabilities on the SRX firewall provide peace of mind for the organization that advanced threats are being prevented, ensuring risk is effectively managed.

“Juniper sets us up for better back-end business systems, IoT, and automation, and it’s the foundation we need for our future,” says Khoury. “We want all our customer-facing experiences to be positive, and having a best-in-class network makes helps support this objective.”

“As a progressive ecommerce business with food as our core service, we needed to make an investment in our technology that allows our business to grow. Juniper gives us value and scalability.”

John Khoury Head of Technology and Change Management, My Muscle Chef

My Muscle Chef Hits Wireless Fitness Goals

The business chose Juniper for a major transformation centered on the development of a state-of-the-art manufacturing and logistics facility in Western Sydney.

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