Food Industry / FoodTech

We design and develop custom solutions for restaurants, food manufacturers, restaurant chains and FoodTech platforms. We build online ordering systems, marketplaces, product catalogs and integrations that help bring order to sales, product availability, payments and deliveries.

Our clients in food

  • HomeChefs
  • BlueApart
  • Sunny Family

Looking for a project in food? Let's talk.

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FoodTech in practice: orders, catalogs and selling direct

In FoodTech, technology has to meet very specific business needs. Orders should reach the right place without being retyped, product availability has to be up to date, and data on ingredients, allergens and nutritional values must be easy to manage. Among other things, we build marketplace platforms, online ordering systems, product catalogs and solutions that support direct sales and integration with external services.

Your own channel vs. delivery platforms

Delivery platforms bring reach, but they take your margin and your contact with the customer. Restaurants and producers that build their own channel — online ordering on their website, pickup or local delivery, a base of regular customers — win both back. The condition is an ordering path shorter than in the intermediary's app: a menu that's easy to read on a phone, payment in two taps, pickup times without having to call. For manufacturers and processors, the catalog and distribution side is more common: offers for retail chains and wholesalers, specifications, certificates, shelf life. A website that organizes this information for each buyer saves the sales team hundreds of emails with attachments.

The product itself is also specific in food: batches, use-by dates, allergens and nutritional values that have to appear on the product page in line with regulations. A catalog that stores this data in a structured way — rather than in free-text descriptions — makes it possible to filter it, update it in bulk and display it the same way across all sales channels.

Case studies in food

„Communication and post-launch support were first-class. At every stage of the project, I knew exactly where we stood.”

Anonymous — CMO, Marketing Agency

Review from Clutch

The basics

FoodTech: what can be improved, and what no system can get around

FoodTech covers selling and delivering food, running a venue, handling orders and everything that comes with a product with a short shelf life. That last feature rules the whole industry: an availability error doesn't mean a delay, it means wasted stock or an order that can't be fulfilled. The most common bottlenecks are scattered sales channels (your own website, delivery apps, phone), no shared availability between them and orders retyped by hand for the kitchen. Every additional channel without integration multiplies the number of mistakes rather than just adding to them.

What a system won't do: it won't shorten preparation time or replace decisions about the menu. But it can show what actually sells, when and in which combinations — and that usually changes the menu more effectively than intuition.

The new HomeChefs website

How we work

How we approach restaurant and food retail projects

We start by getting to know the current process: how orders are taken and how the offer, payments, delivery and product availability are managed. Then we identify which elements are worth integrating or automating. Not every feature has to be built right away — the priority is solutions that deliver the most operational and business value.

On your side are the menu with current prices and allergens, the contracts with delivery platforms and someone who knows how a kitchen shift runs. On our side are channel integrations, implementation and testing under peak conditions.

The timeline depends on the number of sales channels and on whether the delivery platforms offer integration under your partnership model — not all of them do, and not always.

Decisions

Decisions that have the biggest impact on the number of mistakes

Which channels you integrate, and which stay manual. Integrating each channel has a cost; a channel that brings in 3% of orders may not be worth it. It's worth calculating the share before deciding.

Who manages availability. If the kitchen takes an item off the menu, that has to work across all channels at once. Not having a single source of availability is the most common cause of complaints in this industry.

Your own delivery or platforms. It's a business decision, but it changes the scope of the system: your own delivery requires route planning and communication with couriers, while platforms take that off your hands and take your margin and customer contact with it.

What not to do. Don't launch a new system on a Friday evening. Don't leave the kitchen without a fallback mode if the network goes down. And don't add a channel until the existing ones share availability.

A phone showing the sunny-family website

Scope

From a producer's catalog to a marketplace with delivery

The scope varies, but we usually come in at one of three points: when sales go only through intermediaries and you need to build your own channel, when product data is scattered across files and emails, or when the business model requires a platform connecting two sides of a market. For HomeChefs, we built a marketplace for home-cooked meals where regulatory compliance was part of the product — selling food prepared at home has to meet sanitary and labeling requirements. For Sunny Family, we organized the product data and gave the team a catalog they update on their own.

What we build

Marketplaces, ordering and delivery integrations

  • ordering platforms with menus that change daily and today's availability,
  • product catalogs with allergens, ingredients and use-by dates stored as data, not description,
  • marketplaces with seller dashboards, verification and settlements,
  • logistics integrations — like Wolt Drive in HomeChefs: delivery pricing, courier booking and tracking in one system,
  • online payments with tips, refunds and splitting funds between sellers.

Timing matters twice over here: an order has to go through quickly, and information that an item has sold out — instantly.

Compliance

Food requirements built into the system

When selling food, the required information should be part of the product structure, not just a text description. The system can make it easier to manage ingredients, allergens, nutritional values and other required information, among other things, and present them to users at the right point in the buying process.

When designing these solutions, we treat regulatory requirements as part of the system logic that needs to be accounted for at the product design stage.

FAQ

Questions we hear from the food industry

  • We build custom applications and systems for restaurants, food manufacturers and FoodTech platforms. These can include marketplaces, online ordering systems, product catalogues, admin panels, payments and integrations with external services.

  • Custom software makes sense when ready-made systems don't support the company's key processes, non-standard integrations are needed, or the product is meant to develop its own business model. The feature scope can then be tailored to the actual needs of users and the team.

  • Yes, if the service provides suitable integration capabilities. We can connect the system with payment providers, logistics services and other systems used by the company, among others. In HomeChefs we implemented integrations with Stripe and the Wolt API.

  • The best solution is central availability management and synchronisation across sales channels. This way a change made in one place can be automatically propagated to the other systems.

  • As data, not text in a description. An allergen should be a separate field on a product — one that can be filtered on and updated in one place for all products with a given recipe. The information must be available before the customer places an order, not just on the receipt. For own-delivery operations, it also needs to be repeated in the document included with the order.

  • It depends on the share of repeat orders. For a one-time customer, the platform usually wins on reach. For a customer who orders every week, the commission on each subsequent order is a fixed cost that can be avoided. Run the numbers on your own data — the share of returning customers and average order value usually settle the question faster than a discussion about features.
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