Pop Meals
A cloud kitchen with an app in front of it. Pop Meals cooks its own menu in its own kitchens across Kuala Lumpur, and customers order it for delivery, pickup or dine-in, now or ten days from now.
Overview
Pop Meals set out to do food delivery the hard way round. Rather than collecting from restaurants like everyone else, they cook their own menu in their own kitchens and deliver it, which gives them control of the food, the price and the timing, and gives their app a very different job to do.
Pop Meals and Sphinx Solutions partnered on the Android and iOS application development project, to build something people could order from anywhere in Malaysia, at their own convenience.
They researched their options thoroughly before choosing a technology partner, and concluded that Sphinx Solutions had the expertise to get them to their objectives.
With 16 years in software development behind us, we went through their business concept, put several recommendations to them, and worked out which technologies and platforms actually suited the job.
What we delivered was a responsive, secure pair of applications on iOS and Android, built to their specifications rather than to a template.
Pop Meals wanted an on-demand application serving customers across a spread of locations, carrying enough capability to genuinely improve the experience rather than just digitise an order form.
Three interfaces, not one: the customer’s, the delivery agent’s, and the admin panel the kitchen runs from.
The customer side had to be compelling and simple at once, with sign-up, a payment gateway, a location tracker and push notifications.
Notifications had to fire automatically at each stage: order placed, dispatched, and about to arrive. The delivery agent’s interface was kept deliberately plain, with GPS integration so pickup and drop-off are never in doubt.
The admin panel had to let operators set up menus, mark items available or not, and accept or decline orders, because in a cloud kitchen the menu is the business.
Sphinx Solutions delivered the applications with the features that make a cloud kitchen work rather than the ones a marketplace needs.
The result established Pop Meals as a food delivery platform that does not look like the others, because underneath it is not built like them either.
“Pop Meals and Sphinx Solutions teamed up for the application development project, and the collaboration has reaped great results. They helped us deploy progressive mobile applications with highly intuitive interfaces and advanced functionality.”
Tech stack
What people usually ask about Pop Meals and about building something like it.
Project planning and market research, design and conceptualisation, UI/UX and prototyping, choosing the tech stack, front-end and back-end development, performance and usability testing, then launch and marketing.
A marketplace app is a directory: its hard problems are search, listings and keeping restaurant data current. A cloud kitchen app is an operations tool. The menu is set by the operator, capacity is finite and known, and the admin panel that controls availability is as important as the customer app, because if the kitchen cannot cook it the app must not sell it.
Roughly $30,000 to $80,000, though there is no fixed price: it moves with complexity, the feature set, third-party integrations and where the development team is.
Around five to eight months for one with advanced features. That is a rough estimate and depends on complexity, the platforms, the integrations and the stack.
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