Wholistically Healthy

Automation of a home food delivery service in Australia.

The opportunity to speed up and simplify work of a food delivery web-service.

About the project

Wholistically Healthy is a home delivery service that empowers clients to eat fresh, deliciously satisfying and healthy food in their own four walls. This family-owned business is operating in Perth, at a beautiful corner of Australian nature far from the noisy civilization.

People at Wholistically Healthy work hard to cater healthy meals for customers and their families with respecting diverse preferences for different diets — a plant based, gluten-free, protein based or some other dietary requirement, and deliver it fresh on a regular schedule without pre-freezing. They prepare all meals with love and, whenever possible, use only local ingredients. Their sought-after service helps people reduce time spent on searching ingredients such as the risotto rice or the burger buns as well as on the food preparation.

Google Maps Google Maps
PHP PHP
Voyager admin panel Voyager admin panel
MongoDB MongoDB
JavaScript JavaScript
Laravel Laravel

Recently, the founder of the company decided that it’s time to not only take care about the clients and the quality of food, but also about the simplicity of the employed business processes. Routine tasks began to consume too much energy from the entire team.

After analyzing all employee workflows, the client turned to Vasterra with the request to automate the processes involved in preparing orders as much as possible. While Wholistically Healthy mastered their innovative food delivery business, Vasterra mastered automation. So we started analyzing the ingredients that make up our client’s business.

spoons

The task was to develop a solution that automates current business processes

Wholistically Healthy collects all orders manually through Shopify. Users can subscribe to food delivery services ranging from single delivery to several months-long delivery options. Every week, the kitchen team changes its menu and new sets of meals are combined and published on their website.

After collecting all incoming orders, our client manually creates a spreadsheet with all customers and their orders. Before handing the list over to the kitchen team, the ordered dishes are decomposed into their ingredients and, eventually, prepared by the kitchen.

orange

The solution

Our client hasn’t enough time to analyze requirements for service automation due to the large in flow of orders and time-intensive routine tasks required to fulfil these orders. Therefore, Vasterra took over many of the functions of business analytics and studied the business processes in detail.

The work in our IT-kitchen started to boil. We found the right solution that allowed us to automate all processes effectively. The components of the success can be divided into 5 main parts:

1. We created a custom admin panel connected to their Shopify platform

The new admin panel facilitates extra functions not available in Shopify. Our solution picks up orders from Shopify and adapts all data related to these orders to a convenient format for the following processes. The admin tools allow sorting orders for delivery, marking them as fulfilled in bulk, ordering in accordance with the delivery route, forming the delivery route, decomposing meal packs to send just the total list of meals to the kitchen — all without any cumbersome manual work.

orange
image *All names and events are fictitious, any coincidences are accidental.

2. We implemented an automatic label printing based on order lists

You can select the necessary food labels for the meals from a ready-made set of elements in the admin panel and print them. Previously our client could only print blank templates for stickers and fill them out by hand. We made it possible to print the labels based on the information available when preparing the orders.

plate
image *All names and events are fictitious, any coincidences are accidental.

3. We offered a delivery route planner with an open API for simple integration into the system

We picked up a new API with a wide range of functions. It allows full control over the data and has convenient apps for a business owner and delivery drivers. Now, the creation of delivery routes is automated, and they can be intuitively managed through the admin panel.

Our client’s previous API could only feed us the addresses and give us back the complete route. We had no way of getting the processed data back. It was very limited by functions and did not allow much automation.

plate
image *All names and events are fictitious, any coincidences are accidental.

4. We developed a bot in Telegram, where couriers can mark the order as complete and immediately close it

Drivers enter orders into the Telegram bot after delivery and mark the order as completed. The bot then closes these orders in Shopify automatically. All actions of drivers are displayed in the admin panel in real-time.

5. We created a system for decomposing the list of meals into ingredients automatically

We developed a custom solution for an automatic decomposition of meals from sets into separate ingredients. This allows transferring ready-made lists to the kitchen without any manual labor input required. Previously, the client worked with a list of ingredients in Excel spreadsheets. These tables were cumbersome and inconvenient.

We offered an alternative — an import of existing order information files. The admin panel gathers information from Shopify on how many meal packs and separate meals were ordered for the delivery this week. The data from the spreadsheet are requested to determine which items in the list are meal packs and need decomposition. The admin panel decomposes the meal packs and compiles the list of separate dishes for all orders.

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The result of work

The MVP-version of our admin panel is already used by the client. How the automation of the service affects their business:

  • Process of creating a list of meal packs takes several seconds instead of several hours, that can be done by a click of a button.

  • There is no need for handwritten food labels on the meal boxes.

  • Delivery couriers work faster and more efficiently now.

  • Processing orders in the system doesn’t take a lot of time.

  • Customers are more satisfied by the quality of the service.

In addition, our solution reduced employee errors and, therefore, improving customer happiness overproportionally. All information on working with orders is integrated with the Shopify platform (export orders, process information on orders, the information about fulfilled orders). The influence of the human factor is lower than usual. Wholistically Healthy can focus on the favorite part of work instead of routine.

Vasterra helped Wholistically Healthy to focus on what they are best at: preparing dishes and making clients happy. Our team will prepare a convenient service for your business too. Apply for a recipe!

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