MealPe

Corporate canteens at large office campuses faced a predictable and costly problem: 80% of lunch orders arrived within a 25-minute window, creating queues of 40–60 people, overwhelmed kitchen staff, and average wait times of 10–14 minutes. Paper ticket systems — the most common workaround — created a secondary confusion when tickets were lost, duplicated, or called out of order over noisy PA systems.

From the canteen operator's perspective, the lack of demand visibility was the deeper issue. Kitchens prepared ingredients based on historical estimates, leading to 15–25% daily food waste when demand deviated from expectation. There was no mechanism for an employee to pre-order before the rush, no data on which dishes were ordered most, and no way for the kitchen to signal that a popular item had sold out before the queue reached the counter.

MealPe is a two-surface system: a mobile-optimised progressive web app (PWA) for employees, and a kitchen display system (KDS) that runs on a wall-mounted Android tablet. Employees scan a QR code printed at their seat or cafeteria table; the QR encodes their table location and opens the day's menu directly in their mobile browser — no app install required, which was critical for enterprise deployment across large workforces.

Orders are submitted through the PWA and arrive on the KDS in real time via Socket.io. The KDS displays orders as cards in a Kanban-style board (New → Preparing → Ready), ordered by arrival time with a per-item preparation timer. When a kitchen team member marks an order as "Ready", the customer receives an in-browser push notification (Web Push API) so they can collect without standing and waiting.

The canteen admin panel (React + Recharts) provides live demand heatmaps and historical order analytics by dish, time slot, and day of week. Canteen managers use this data to adjust prep quantities each morning — a feature that directly addresses the food waste problem. Menu management supports daily specials, item availability toggles (sold-out items disappear from the menu in real time), and configurable ordering windows (the system can be locked 15 minutes before service ends).

In three deployed canteens, average meal wait time dropped from 12 minutes to under 3 minutes, and the visible queue at the collection counter was eliminated entirely — employees collect only when notified, spreading collection events across the service window rather than clustering them at peak minutes.

Food waste decreased by approximately 20% in the first month as kitchen managers began using the previous-day demand data to calibrate prep quantities. The canteen operator reported a 30% reduction in kitchen overtime costs, as spread demand meant the team no longer needed to run at maximum capacity for the 25-minute spike. One campus extended the deployment from the main canteen to two satellite kiosks within 90 days.