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The decision has a deadline, the kitchen has a schedule, and the equipment is either working or it is not. The Middleby Corporation understands that urgency better than most. A global commercial foodservice equipment manufacturer headquartered in Elgin, Illinois, Middleby serves the full ecosystem of the restaurant and hospitality industry, including dealers, consultants, independent sales reps, and the operators and chefs who depend on their equipment every single day. With a portfolio of approximately 70 commercial brands worldwide, Middleby's products are in kitchens across the world, from high-volume quick-serve chains to fine dining establishments to institutional foodservice operations.  That scale is Middleby's strength. But for years, it also made one thing genuinely hard: giving customers the fast, confident experience they expected at the moments that mattered most. #### The Challenge The Weight of 32 Brands on One Team For chefs and operators running commercial kitchens, whether they are managing a single high-volume location or coordinating equipment across multiple sites, getting a straight answer can mean the difference between keeping pace with the rush and falling behind. A question about specifications, compatibility, or lead times cannot wait. But at Middleby, that friction existed across the entire customer journey, and Donelle Lockhart, the company's CRM and Content Manager, had been watching it build for years. Donelle came to Middleby's corporate team from one of its brands. She understood the business from the inside out, including the layered go-to-market, the independent rep network, the way knowledge was siloed by brand, and the way customers felt the complexity, whether they knew that was what they were experiencing or not. Three years ago, she took the reins of HubSpot across the entire portfolio. What she found was a decentralized, multi-brand business whose complexity had outpaced the tools available to manage it. Donelle had a clear initiative: bring the full Middleby commercial portfolio directly to end users through Middleby Shop, the company's newly launched quoting platform. That meant giving customers a single destination to explore products, get pricing, and move toward a purchase — across 32 brands, each with its own products, pricing structures, reps, dealers, and customer ecosystem. The challenge wasn't capability, but rather capacity. With a solo CSR supporting the platform, Donelle knew that relying on live agent coverage for every incoming question would create a ceiling on what Middleby Shop could deliver. Customers asking about model fit, lead times, or pricing needed answers immediately, and the volume of those questions — roughly 15 hours of coverage every week — made it clear that a smarter approach was needed. That's when Donelle identified HubSpot's Breeze Customer Agent as the solution. If it could handle real-time pricing questions and support product recommendations directly within Middleby Shop, the platform could scale without scaling the team. __What Was at Stake__ Donelle saw the full shape of the problem. For Middleby's customers, the risk was slow answers in high-stakes moments, including quote requests that sat too long, buying intent that cooled while waiting on a callback, and misrouted inquiries that burned time on both sides. In a commercial kitchen environment, delays do not just create friction. They signal a company that cannot move at the speed of its customers. For dealers and consultants who have choices about which equipment brands they recommend, that signal matters. For Donelle, the risk was different and more personal. She had a clear vision for what customer experience could look like across 32 brands. She knew what insights were buried in the customer conversations her team was having every day. She could see the trends, the knowledge gaps, and the product categories where customers were struggling to find their way. But she could not pursue that strategy while the team's capacity was tied up in high-volume, repetitive coverage. That was when Donelle stopped asking how to manage the workload. She started asking how to redesign it. #### The Solution Middleby's customers needed faster answers at the moments that mattered most, when they were trying to identify a product, confirm pricing, request a quote, or figure out whether they needed service or parts. What they needed was a platform experience that could meet them immediately, one that didn't require a human behind every answer to deliver a human-quality response. Donelle's decision was deliberate. She was looking for a way to remove her team from the bottleneck, so they could stop doing work that did not require their expertise and start doing work that only they could do. __Building Grillbert with Intent__ The centerpiece of that strategy was Customer Agent, which the team affectionately named Grillbert. Built on HubSpot's full customer platform, Grillbert is the next generation of Middleby's chat experience, a custom-designed agent that handles the high-volume, high-repetition questions that had been consuming the team's day. Customers visiting Middleby Shop, the company's quoting platform, can now get immediate answers on model identification, pricing, product fit, and availability without waiting for a human to respond. Grillbert pulls from real product data in real time, guiding customers to the right next step, whether that is a quote request or a product selector for more complex decisions. What Donelle built into Grillbert, which makes it genuinely useful and not just functional, is judgment. The agent knows when to stop and hand the conversation to a person. When a customer's question moves beyond what the agent can confidently answer, Grillbert escalates with full context. The team sees exactly what was asked, what the agent said, and where the customer is in their journey. There are no dropped threads and no starting from scratch. The customer feels like they are talking to one team, not being filtered through a system before reaching a human.  __A Connected Platform Behind the Experience__ Grillbert was intentional, and so was everything Donelle built around it. HubSpot's full CRM platform, spanning Marketing Hub, Sales Hub, Service Hub, and automation and reporting capabilities, gave Middleby the infrastructure to operate as a genuinely connected business for the first time. Automation replaced the email chains that used to move opportunities between teams. Sales handoffs to independent reps now happen automatically, with the right people notified at the right moment, without anyone manually coordinating the pass. Snippets gave the team ready-made responses for the scenarios that did reach them, cutting the time spent composing the same message from scratch. Dashboards gave the VP of sales and the broader team real-time visibility into what was happening across brands, not just activity counts, but the shape of demand. What was moving, what was stalling, and what categories were generating the most quote requests became visible. In a decentralized, multi-brand business, that kind of shared view had simply never existed before. __Visibility That Turns Questions into Strategy__ Every other week, Donelle pulls conversation data from Grillbert and uses it the way a strategist would. She is not counting tickets. She is reading the narrative. Which product categories are customers struggling to navigate? Where does the agent hit a wall that signals a content gap or a missing product selector? What patterns in the questions point to something the business should act on? Early on, Donelle noticed customers were repeatedly asking about soft serve ice cream machines in ways that suggested they could not find what they were looking for. The insight came directly from Grillbert's conversation data. The response was a new product selector built to close that gap. Every customer who came after benefited from a cleaner, faster path to the right answer, because Donelle was positioned to act on what the data was showing her. That shift, from reactive to analytical and from triage to strategy, was exactly what she had designed for.  #### __The Transformation__ Middleby's customers can now get faster answers in the moments that matter most. A dealer confirming specs before a client meeting, or an operator trying to figure out whether they need a service call or a replacement part, can all move forward quickly. Grillbert handles those conversations immediately, accurately, and with the context to know when a human needs to step in. The experience is fast, guided, and critically, it does not dead-end. The volume of low-value support tickets has dropped, and the mix of inbound requests has shifted toward quote-oriented activity, which is exactly what Middleby wants to see. Customers are getting what they need at the front line, which means the conversations that do reach the team are the ones that actually require human expertise. __The Proof: Recovered Capacity, Compounding Returns__ The impact shows up clearly in how time and resources are used. Customer Agent gives the team back approximately three hours per day, roughly 15 hours per week, which represents a significant portion of the time previously spent on repetitive triage. That shift frees up meaningful capacity for higher-value work, without adding headcount. This is the TCO story in its clearest form: HubSpot's full customer platform did not just reduce administrative overhead, it unlocked the strategic value that was already sitting in Donelle and her team's expertise, waiting for the right conditions to surface. On average, brands consolidated into Middleby's shared portal have reduced their HubSpot-related costs by more than 65%. Standardized onboarding is now significantly more efficient, reducing the cost and effort required to bring each brand online compared to fragmented, brand-by-brand setups. With 32 brands already unified in the U.S. portal and more consolidating, those efficiency gains continue to scale across the business. __What Changed for Donelle__ Before HubSpot's full customer platform gave her team the infrastructure to scale, Donelle was absorbing the overhead herself — manually coordinating handoffs, translating between tools, chasing information that should have been visible to everyone, and bridging the gaps that come with managing a multi-brand business without a unified system. She was doing important work, but it was not the work she was there to do. Now, she is the strategist she always had the capacity to be. She is using customer conversation data to identify where Middleby needs better content, better tools, and better routing. She is working across brands to standardize the experience in ways that actually hold. She is surfacing trends that inform decisions beyond her team, including product gaps, market signals, and places where the customer experience and the business strategy can align more tightly. The shift is not just operational. It is what happens when you stop managing complexity and start shaping it. "Customer Agent came at a perfect time," Donelle said. "We are in a very new space, and we needed all the help we could get with our very small team. Grillbert steps in where we cannot be everywhere at once, and it knows when to hand things back." Table of Contents Table of Contents - [The Background](https://www.hubspot.com#the-background) - [The Challenge](https://www.hubspot.com#the-challenge) - [The Solution](https://www.hubspot.com#the-solution) - [The Transformation](https://www.hubspot.com#the-transformation)  > Grillbert changed what our small team can do. With HubSpot's Customer Agent, Middleby customers get faster answers in the moments that matter, and we got back 15 hours a week to focus on what actually grows the business. Donelle Lockhart CRM and Content Manager [The Middleby Corporation](https://www.middleby.com/?missing=undefined) [](https://www.middleby.com/?missing=undefined)  ### Start Growing With HubSpot Today With tools to make every part of your process more human and a support team excited to help you, growing your business with HubSpot has never been easier. 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