A partnership on the Cibus front-end
Sodexo Cibus built Cibus — Israel's largest prepaid meal-benefit network, the card that lands in hundreds of thousands of employee wallets every morning. The team there knows the product, the architecture, and the users better than anyone else could. When they wanted to add deeper front-end and architecture expertise alongside their own engineers, they brought us in as a partner. We've been working with them since: writing Angular and contributing to architecture conversations, on their roadmap, under their direction.
About Cibus
Cibus is run by Sodexo Cibus in Israel. It's the country's largest prepaid meal-benefit platform — hundreds of thousands of employees use it for lunch every day, tens of thousands of restaurants and merchants accept it, and the employee app and merchant flow run all of that day to day.
Sodexo Cibus has owned this product end to end for years. Strategy, architecture, roadmap — all of it sits with their team. They know which decisions matter, where the pain is, and what the next quarter looks like. That isn't something an outside team gets to come in and answer.
What they wanted
Not consultants. Cibus didn't need outside opinions on how to build their own product. What they wanted was additional front-end depth — engineers who could write production Angular and contribute to architecture conversations — working alongside their team, under their direction. A partnership, not a vendor relationship.
Most of what gets sold as "front-end consulting" gets that backwards. It shows up with a playbook and starts advising the customer on their own product. That was never going to work here.
How we work together
We place senior front-end people on the Cibus team: an FE Architect and Angular engineers, working inside the team rather than across a vendor wall. Same standups, same git, same delivery cadence as the in-house engineers. The brief comes from Cibus. The roadmap comes from Cibus. We bring depth where it adds something, and nothing we do undermines the ownership Cibus has over their own product.
The commercial side is time and material — hours used, not seats reserved. That model only works when both sides trust each other to do their part. Cibus trusts us to use the hours on the right things. We trust them to know when more help is needed and when it isn't. That kind of arrangement doesn't last without partnership; with one, it runs for years.
roadmap & direction
their in-house team
trust-based model
What Cibus says
Deep technology and development-flow understanding. They built tailor-made solutions and custom product designs for us, and the timelines were always their top priority.Benni Shalom · CIO, Sodexo
Where it stands
Cibus keeps building Cibus. We're alongside them where the work adds something. The relationship has run long enough that we know the codebase the way an inside team does — which is the only reason the partnership is worth anything to either side.
When this fits
A partnership like this only works when both sides are honest about who's leading. The customer has to know their own product cold and be willing to direct the work. The vendor has to actually follow that lead — not show up with a playbook and start advising. When both of those are true, time-and-material runs for years. When either is missing, it doesn't.
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