Harvest Link

Virtual vendor for chefs and food distributors

Product Design
Frontend Engineering
Backend Engineering
HarvestLink

About The Project

HarvestLink addresses the inefficient and fractured phone/fax ordering process of the food industry by streamlining the ordering connection between chefs and their vendors; saving them precious time and money.

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My Contributions

I was involved in the entire product development cycle from ideation to high-fidelity MVP and full stack engineering. I began the UX research process with an ethnographic study of chefs in high-pressure, time-poor restaurants in San Francisco.

I then mapped their mental model to the overall information architecture that would be needed to program the database for the API. I proceeded to create wireframes, design and test prototypes with chefs and vendors in their domain and finally create the MVP to achieve the optimal experience for both user-sides of the SaaS platform.

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Project Challenges

  • One Chef. Multiple Vendors cause chefs to lose time and money - chefs spend too much time on phone/fax ordering, reordering and tracking restaurant costs.
  • One vendor. Multiple Customers - cause vendors to incur losses everyday from customer returns and ordering errors because of fragmented, outdated phone/fax infrastructure.
  • High-pressure, time-poor restaurant environment.

Strategies

  • Created programmable automated features for tasks chefs do the most (pre- ordering, re-ordering etc).
  • Real-time cash flow analysis for vendors with clear to understand graphs and data points.
  • Consolidated monthly invoices with COD payments intuitive UI elements and one-click solutions, pre-filled forms.

The Solution

A cross-platform 'Virtual Vendor’ sales management system that spans web, mobile and POS systems allowing chefs to submit, modify and track their orders while vendors can manage inventory and consolidate invoices.

HarvestLink
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