Mother's Deli Lunch Platform
A 25-year-old Markham deli's school lunch program, rebuilt from email-and-paper into one platform: parents order on a calendar, schools order in bulk, and the kitchen prints exactly what to cook.
The problem
Mother's Deli & Bakery has fed Markham's schools for 25 years, but orders arrived as emails, paper sheets, and phone calls. The manual workflow had already cost the business school contracts: forms got lost, payments straggled, and the kitchen cooked from hand-collated lists.
The system
- 01
Three portals, one codebase
Parents pick meals per child per school day on a calendar that knows each school’s delivery weekdays and closed dates. School offices get a teacher-by-item bulk grid that mirrors the caterer’s original paper sheet. The kitchen runs menus, pricing, and payments from one admin.
- 02
Money that cannot drift
Every amount is an integer cent value, snapshotted per line at checkout so later price edits never rewrite history. Totals are recomputed server-side and reconciled against Stripe before an order is marked paid, confirmed by webhook, never by the redirect. Nothing is hard-deleted; cancellation is a status.
- 03
Output the kitchen actually uses
Printable production matrices and per-school delivery manifests with allergy flags and classroom routing reproduce the client’s existing paper format exactly. A transactional snow-day rescheduler moves every affected meal, closes the date, writes an audit row, and notifies parents.
- 04
Owned, self-hosted
A standalone Docker build with zero recurring SaaS cost. The only third party is Stripe, per-transaction. The same ownership handover that is standard on every Qutira build.
The result
The platform is built and deployed for the deli, and a public demo runs at lunch-demo.qutira.com on fully invented data. Walk the parent flow yourself. It is now being productized into a multi-tenant, white-label platform for other caterers and school food programs.
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