A marketplace rebuilt, and menus that load themselves.
HUNDO is a meal-plan marketplace in Dubai: every meal plan in one place, from the city's kitchens. Its owner asked us to recreate and improve the app and back office a previous agency had built, and to work towards menus that upload automatically from the kitchens it works with. We are building the new platform alongside the system the business runs today, which stays live until the switch-over.
The problem
Menus typed in by hand, and a panel that only hid buttons.
The marketplace's menus were keyed in by hand, and its old admin panel hid buttons from people rather than enforcing what each role could do.
The brief was clear: menus from a known source, kept current; kitchens without a website upload by link; gaps emailed back to the kitchen; every kitchen checks its own menu; and dish photos kept uniform.
What we built
A back office with real roles
Four roles enforced on the server, not just hidden in the interface, across dashboards, kitchens, menus and orders, with an audit log of every change and sixteen data-quality checks.
Menus that load themselves
Each kitchen's menu comes from a known source — its website, an upload or a link — and is read into weeks, days, meals and dishes, with nutrition, by AI.
Kitchens in the loop
A portal where kitchens see each menu and can object, with anything missing emailed back to them.
A customer app
Plan search, a price builder, the real menu before choosing dates, a basket across kitchens, and pause, skip and swap, with a delivery calendar that knows every cut-off.
Health, on the phone
A daily score with meals logged from deliveries, alongside sleep, glucose and fasting, kept on the phone.
A website
The plan builder with menu previews, a calendar and a basket, and an account area to skip, pause, resume and reorder plans, covered by hundreds of tests.
A running app
A GPS run tracker with a voice coach, splits and crash-safe recording, heat advice for Dubai and checked routes. Group runs are in progress.
A customer API
Sign-in by emailed code, Apple or Google, a wallet, checkout priced on the server, and account deletion. Merged for production in October, and it serves the old App Store app too, so the app people already have keeps working after the switch-over.
Under the surface
The engineering
- 01
Fast, and dated: the first commit and a read-only extractor for the old system landed on 24 September 2026, a demo of the new back office was set up the next day, and the new iPhone app, version 2.0.0, was ready for TestFlight on 19 October.
- 02
The menu collector honours robots.txt, skips pages that have not changed, and reads PDFs, photos, spreadsheets and web pages.
- 03
A six-rule check decides whether an imported menu could publish itself. For now the default is review by a person, side by side with the source.
- 04
A week built by hand, or approved by its kitchen, is never overwritten by an import, and no dish photo is ever made by AI.
- 05
The old system's data comes across through a read-only extractor, and an importer that anonymises customers on the way in.
- 06
Staff sessions are signed and last twelve hours, customer tokens are stored hashed, and one-time codes are HMACs.
- 07
Orders are priced on the server and safe to retry, so a repeated request never creates a second order.
- 08
The menu catalogue is served with ETags and compression, taking it from 6.3 MB to 0.6 MB.
Shown with permission
HUNDO has agreed to this work being shown. Its customers are not: the new platform runs as a demonstration with anonymised customers while the business's current system stays live, and the new app is not on the App Store yet.
Services this drew on
More work
- Our productVizi PlayerA media player for iPhone, iPad and Apple TV, and for Android phones, tablets and Android TV, that plays the playlist a person already has. It comes with no content of its own.
- Our productLinkACodeTurns a server address into a short code, like AB123456. Give out the code instead of the address.
- Our productVantanAn iPhone and iPad app for watching the IP cameras you already own, privately: the video goes from the camera to your phone and nowhere else.
- Our productVVS PanelOur foundation for client back offices: a React design system for admin panels built around each client's own data and roles.
- Our own toolFrontalA private AI operations assistant: mail, renewals, deadlines and system health in one phone app, with a local AI model that sorts, drafts and flags.
- Client workPush PromotionsA 1,299-page WordPress site rebuilt as fast pre-rendered pages, every one at its old address, so the move keeps its search rankings.
- Client workSinclair GroupThree linked websites for one West Midlands group: everyday car hire, prestige cars and private jets, each with its own design, from one build.
- Client workBlipA trade website for a performance-wear brand, with a 3D rain test that soaks the jacket as you scroll.
- Client workSarah Ellen BrownA portfolio site for a London designer: a pinned scroll scene through a portal, layered parallax and an arc of project cards.
- Our productEzSuppBotAI customer support for Telegram: each business connects its own support bot, which answers, suggests a reply or waits for a person.
- Our productEzForwardBotCopies new posts between your Telegram channels automatically, with filters and optional AI touch-ups.
Start a project
Want something like HUNDO?
Grade it in four quick choices and add the parts we have already built, or just send a few lines. We reply within one business day.