Interactive catering menu quoting system

We’ve just gone live with a new approach for caterers to work through menus with their customers.

Say you want to cater a function. Go online to the website and answer three quick questions .. how many people? what sort of function? what style of food?

Then, we present you with a menu. Now you have an ajax-based menu planner where you can add new dishes, change them, remove them, mess with the quantities of dishes until you are happy. Browsing and Searching for dishes and ingredients is supported. There are over 100 dishes to choose from, so it give the function planner a lot of flexibility to get their favourites in there.

Once you’ve made a menu, then three more simple questions. Name, date for the function and a phone number. You’re done. Catering staff then call to go through the details.

And we’ve simplified things a lot in this. Go back to the site after you’ve planned a menu and you get your menu back again.

The menu and photos are all held in a SQL database and there’s an admin system to control menu planning, adding dishes and photographs.

Best of all, this is fun to play with, though it does tend to make you a bit hungry.

The live system is for Fingerfood Catering of Perth, Western Australia. Please go and have a look, but don’t commit orders unless you mean to order catering and live in Perth.

Huge Kudos to Bret Treasure of Free Beer for marketing/coordination and concept, and Emma Broe for design.

Technology: I used Python, Myghty, SQLAlchemy, MySQL and JavaScript with JSON to make it all work.

Sussex Digital

Sussex Digital is a new focus for the digital community in Brighton, Hove and surrounding Sussex.   It is beginning with a focus on local events.  We are so lucky here in Brighton. We have a geek event on almost every day or night of the week, making it a very vibrant place for web startups to develop.