The Challenge
Dunnhumby, the data science company behind Tesco's Clubcard loyalty program, wanted to create a new way for consumers to share their shopping data directly. The vision was HuYu—an app that let consumers monetize their purchase data by submitting receipts and connecting loyalty accounts.
The challenge: build a consumer-facing app on cutting-edge technology (Flutter was still in beta) while establishing a fully serverless backend capable of processing consumer insights at scale.
Our Approach
- Google Partnership: Led development in strategic collaboration with Google to showcase Flutter/Firebase in production
- Early Adoption: Pioneered Flutter as an early framework adopter when it was still maturing (2018)
- Receipt Scanning: Integrated ScanBot SDK for high-quality receipt capture and document detection
- OCR Pipeline: Built Python/Pandas pipeline using Google Cloud Vision for receipt text extraction and parsing
- Serverless Backend: Architected fully serverless infrastructure using Firebase Cloud Functions
- Data Pipeline: Built BigQuery integration for processing consumer receipt data into actionable insights
- Cross-Platform: Delivered iOS and Android apps from a single Dart codebase
Architecture
flowchart TB
subgraph HuYu["HuYu App (2018)"]
Flutter[Flutter Client]
ScanBot[ScanBot SDK]
end
subgraph GCP["Google Cloud Platform"]
Auth[Firebase Auth]
CF[Cloud Functions]
FS[(Firestore)]
Vision[Cloud Vision]
Python[Python/Pandas]
BQ[(BigQuery)]
end
Flutter --> ScanBot
ScanBot --> CF
Flutter --> Auth
CF --> Vision
Vision --> Python
Python --> FS
FS --> BQ
Results
The HuYu app demonstrated Flutter's production readiness:
- Successfully launched Flutter app in strategic partnership with Google
- Established fully serverless architecture handling consumer data at scale
- Proved Flutter viability for enterprise production use cases
- Built foundation for dunnhumby's consumer data initiatives
- Gained deep expertise as early Flutter adopter that continues today
timeline
title Flutter Pioneer (2018)
section Partnership
Google Collaboration : Strategic partnership
: Early access to Flutter
section Development
HuYu App : Receipt scanning
: OCR pipeline
section Launch
Production : iOS and Android
: Serverless backend
