How we streamlined school meals fulfillment for a Centra Store

Creating and building an integrated solution designed for seamless management of meals from order placement to delivery through an easy to use intuitive application which benefits food providers, schools and parents alike.

Services

Bespoke Application Development Mobile App Development

Platform

ReactJS Python Django Flutter

The Challenge

A Centra store was managing meal orders from a local school in a very manual paper driven way. Managing menus, meal orders, order cut-off times, allergens, and labels was challenging and inefficient and consumed significant time.

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The Solution

The first step was to understand the needs of the store, the school and the parents of the children. The store needed the ability to manage multiple schools and menus, parents needed to be able to order meals for their children in a simple intuitive manner taking allergens into consideration. The school required minimal involvement in the ordering and fulfilment process.

The second step was to design and build an application for the store to create and schedule menus and manage orders for each school. The application needed to be sympathetic to the environment it was operating in and have the ability to generate and print labels by class, pupil and meal type. Stats on future orders would allow efficient ordering of ingredients.

The third step was to design and build a mobile application for parents to order meals. Design played a key role in making the app user friendly and intuitive, enabling parents to sign-up and place orders in a couple of clicks. Parents could record their children’s allergies which would prevent them from mistakenly ordering a meal not was not suitable. Reminders for order deadlines, recording of planned absences all played a part in streamlining the overall fulfilment process whilst minimising waste.

The final step was to design part of the store application for schools to access that would allow the school to record school holidays and authorise parents of pupils to access the mobile app.

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The Result

Lunchbox Larry, a user-friendly solution for Caterers, Shop Delis, Cafes, and Restaurant kitchens, that streamlines menu management and meal order processing for schools. With a mobile app, parents can place orders easily, while the fulfilment application handles the orders efficiently.

Lunchbox Larry revolutionizes school meal provision by integrating an online platform that allows local food providers to process and deliver meals efficiently. This supports the local economy and ensures meals arrive fresh and hot.

Parents can use the Lunchbox Larry mobile app to order nutritious school meals conveniently, view allergen information, and notify providers of absences. No more paper forms in school bags—ordering is now simple and hassle-free.