Tom and I met on Twitter a couple of years ago when he saw a prep table I designed and tweeted me a couple of questions about it. Our collaboration blossomed from there.. We went on to use one of the tables at a benefit auction to raise money for local agriculture and he helped me with a cooking video when I was trying to launch a new cook-at-home meal product. We have stayed in touch and trade food for IT and design help here and there. His business has transitioned from a cook-in-the-home personal chef to a gourmet meal delivery service. Working together, we were able to handle his new venture’s ecommerce and newsletter duties with Shopify and Mailchimp respectively.
This initial tech combination worked well enough to launch his business and his client list grew steadily over the next 6 months. His clients loved his food and the insanely attentive service Tom provided. When I waited tables I LOATHED the “sauce on the side” people, but Tom relished serving his clients every small culinary nuance. Just one of the many ways Tom is a much nicer person than me.
This fanatically attentive service started to create a bottleneck for Tom and his business. Processing so many orders, for so many people, with very little scalability from a dish level was becoming untenable. He had pushed Excel spreadsheets to their limit keeping a handle on all of these details, and the labeling and station ticket output was causing slow-downs in the kitchen (he had only one day a week in the commercial kitchen). He had to streamline his system without ANY compromise in service.
I kicked around some sketches on a back of a napkin and recruited my brother to work the database backend. Once we determined that there was a viable project and that we had the team to execute it, I carved out some time to go see Tom’s team in action in the kitchen with his current system.
I was giddy.