Improving Local Food Links School Meal Ordering System

Creating a Custom .NET solution for Local Food Links’ school meal ordering system. How we improved reliability, performance & eliminated missed orders

A school lunch line with a lunch lady serving the children food. In the foreground is a girl with a plate of food reaching for a green apple.

CLIENTLocal Food Links

SECTORRetail & trade

REACHUnited Kingdom

About Local Food Links

Local Food Links is a not-for-profit organisation that offers parents an alternative option to packed lunches and school meals. They supply over 40 schools across Central South England and allow parents to order hot and cold meals from the comfort of their home that can be delivered to their child’s school for lunch. Since its initial launch in 1999, they have provided healthy school lunches for children all over the UK.

The Challenge

Local Food Links required help from a .NET agency to help maintain their custom system and make improvements to the reliability and performance. An online portal was needed to be created for parents to order school meals for their children. As a government-funded initiative, the budget for this project was limited - so, we needed to create a lean solution to meet their needs.

The existing system wasn’t functioning quite as it should have been, meaning that orders were getting lost and as a result children would miss their meals. By re-writing the payment system entirely we were able to remove this error swiftly to get the system back on track.

The Solution

We worked closely with Local Food Links to review the current system and outline all the key problems including what needed the most improvements to help the process be more reliable in the long run.

By creating a targeted plan, we were able to address the critical issues within the budget. Since they already had the system in place, there was no build work required for this project but they came to us to maintain the current system and make additional improvements.

Since updating and releasing their newest version there have been 0 missing orders which shows the overall success of the project. In just three months we drastically improved the current system's performance which led to fantastic feedback from parents and improved the usage of the system altogether. Seeing such a vast improvement meant that parents were able to trust in the system again allowing LFL to continue reaching out to other schools and growing their brand.