BESPOKE ERP SOLUTION FOR A FOOD SERVICE COMPANY
Unity Meals: Building Meals for Schools
A custom built enterprise resource planning tool for a K12 food service company with flexibility to meet changing federal and state nutritional regulatory requirements.
The Client
Unity Meals is a southern California based food service provider for private and public schools. The client came to Materialize with the need of replacing a fifteen plus year old digital solution with a modern solution that allows for flexibility between their private and public school meal offerings.
The Challenge
The Unity Meals team was serving their public school clients using a digital process that included a highly complex and manual spreadsheet solution. This process was fraught with errors and data entry problems.
The Solution
Materialize came to the aid of Unity Meals by providing business process analysis solutions as well as a path to delivery that leveraged their old system’s capabilities. While analyzing their business, Materialize identified a minimally viable solution and path to delivery to alleviate the bottlenecks with their current process while providing an intuitive UX solution for their staff to quickly get acclimated to their new system.
Services We Provided
+ Product Strategy
+ Product Design
+ Web App Engineering
+ On-Going Support
Platforms
+ Web
+ CMS
Tech Stack
+ Figma
+ PHP
+ Laravel
+ ReactJS
+ GraphQL API
+ MySQL
+ Docker
+ AWS
+ SQS
+ Serverless Infrastructure
+ Unit Testing
+ CI/CD
REPORTING, MENUS, CUSTOMER ORDERING
Front and Back Office Operations United Using New and Existing Technologies
While building an intuitively designed UX, Materialize brought in an all encompassing menu builder, customer management, and ordering system together into a flexible ERP solution while also leveraging existing customer data built in an older system.
REGULATORY ADAPTABILITY
An Agile Approach to Changing State and Federal Nutritional Requirements
Part of the MVP design required Materialize to devise a way to allow Unity Meals to report to educators that their students are indeed meeting the nutritional requirements outlined by state and federal regulatory bodies. As part of the reporting modules built by Materialize, we connected existing fields to report on the building blocks as defined by the government which can then be computed together when an order is placed. This gives the team at Unity Meals the ability to change these building blocks as the government revises them while also showing educators that their students’ nutritional needs are indeed being met.
