Case study: Custom software
Kitchen operations dashboard for a meal delivery business
Orders, production, inventory and recipes managed in one live dashboard instead of spreadsheets and logs.
Overview
HalalMeals is a Toronto-based halal meal delivery service, delivering chef-crafted, fully certified meals across Ontario and Quebec. With a rotating weekly menu, they enable busy professionals, families, and students to enjoy wholesome, ready-to-eat halal meals without compromise.
The problem
A meal delivery business came to us with these problems:
- Managing orders, production, and inventory via spreadsheets and logs.
- No real-time visibility into ingredient usage or order status.
- Manual workflows limited capacity, caused errors, and slowed decisions.
- Lack of a system to grow beyond 200 dishes per week.
What we built
We designed and built six connected apps, one for each part of the kitchen, all working from the same live data:
- Production orders: Monitors and updates active daily and weekly orders.
- Inventory: Tracks stock and ingredient usage across the whole operation, with recipe management to keep production accurate.
- Preparation board: Shows what needs prepping and alerts on low-stock items before they delay production.
- Cooking board: Tracks daily batch performance and timelines.
- Packaging board: Gives real-time visibility on packing progress and workflow.
- Admin dashboard: Central control for reports, analytics and user management.
How it works
The system runs on the tools listed below. Platform names appear here and in the stack, so you can see exactly what was used.
- Frontend: Retool
- Backend: PostgreSQL (Plesk), Amazon S3
Result
- Scaled weekly meal production from 200 to more than 2,000 dishes.
- Reduced manual data entry errors, improving order accuracy.
- Achieved real-time visibility across all kitchen stations dashboards.
- Streamlined inventory tracking and recipe management, reducing waste.
- Boosted team productivity through automated reporting and insights.
"They have done a great job with setting us up with six apps on Retool. They built us an operational dashboard with inventory, order and restaurant production management, along with an insights dashboard. They have a very good knowledge of designing database architecture. We would happily work with MaqMinds again in the future."
Related
This project is an example of custom software. If your team has a similar workflow, the pages below explain how we approach it, and the neighbouring case studies show the same ideas in other businesses.