How it works
An order comes in. This system works out which boxes it needs, decides what goes in each one, and prints the paperwork. The packer follows the sheets. That's it.
The journey of one order
Five steps, start to finish. Only the last two involve a person — everything before that happens on its own, in about a second.
A customer places an order
They pick their meals on the website and pay. Say 14 meals in total.
CustomerThe shop tells us instantly
The moment the payment goes through, the online shop sends the order straight here — customer, address, and every meal they bought. Nobody types anything, and nothing is missed.
AutomaticWe work out the boxes
The system looks at how many meals there are and which box sizes you use, then picks the best combination and decides exactly what goes in each box. More on this below.
AutomaticThe packer prints and packs
The order appears on the Orders screen. One button — Print all documents — produces a tick-list for every box and an address label for every box. The packer works down the list and ticks meals off.
PackerMarked as packed
One press of Mark order as packed and it drops off the to-do list. The paperwork can still be reprinted afterwards if a label gets torn.
PackerWhere the online shop fits in
Right now there is a Simulator page that lets you type in an order by hand, exactly as if it had come from the shop. It's there so you can see the whole thing working today, before anything is connected up.
When we do connect the real shop, only the very first step changes. Everything after it is already built, already tested, and stays exactly as it is.
Simulator
The real shop
Only the top box changes colour. That's the point of building it this way — connecting the real shop is a small job, not a rebuild, and the simulator stays afterwards as a handy way to test things.
How we choose the boxes
You currently pack into a small box holding 8 meals and a large box holding 12 meals. The system follows two rules, in this order.
Use as few boxes as possible
Fewer boxes means less packing, less cardboard, and lower postage.
Waste as little space as possible
If two combinations use the same number of boxes, take the one with less empty space. Meals rattling around in a half-empty box arrive damaged.
Worked example: an order of 14 meals
14 won't fit in one box, so it needs two either way. Both options below use two boxes — so rule 1 can't separate them, and rule 2 decides.
And when the rules disagree: 24 meals
Three small boxes (8 + 8 + 8) would be perfectly full — no waste at all. But two large boxes (12 + 12) are also perfectly full and that's one box fewer. Rule 1 comes first, so the system picks two large boxes.
You can change all of this without anyone touching the software. Edit a capacity on the Boxes page — or add a whole new box size — and every order from that moment on is planned using the new sizes. There's a preview on that page so you can try a change before committing to it.
When one meal has to be split up
If somebody orders 10 chicken curries and a box only holds 8, the curries have to be spread across both boxes. The system does this for you and works out the exact numbers, so the packer never has to.
- Chicken Curry× 10
- Beef Stroganoff× 4
- Chicken Curry× 8
- Chicken Curry× 2
- Beef Stroganoff× 4
Anything split this way is badged SPLIT on screen, so nobody looks at box 2, sees only two curries, and thinks eight have gone missing.
What the packer actually gets
One press of Print all documents produces a single file with everything in it, in the right order: sheet, label, sheet, label, box by box.
Pick sheet
A list of what goes in that box, with a numbered tick box for every single meal. Tick as you go and you cannot lose count. The total is printed at the bottom to check against.
Box label
Big BOX 1 OF 2, the customer's name and the delivery address. The box number is deliberately huge so a stack of boxes can be read at a glance.
What if something doesn't fit?
The system never guesses and never silently drops a meal. If an order genuinely cannot be packed with your current box sizes, it says so in plain English and tells you what would fix it — for example, that a product is bigger than your largest box and you'd need to add a new box size.
The order is still safely recorded either way. Nothing gets lost.