lise GmbH

Description

Alongside customer closeness and sustainability, a passion for innovation is a core value at apetito AG. That’s why we developed a new web portal together—one in which these values come to life for customers. Since 1958, apetito has been providing nutrition solutions for people in the widest range of eating and life situations. Our catering offerings include special menus for children, students, and businesses, as well as for workshops, patients, and seniors. And for decades, this long-established company has continued to offer its traditional meal delivery service—food on wheels—as part of its range. Our customer describes itself as a catering specialist. Alongside customer closeness and sustainability, innovation is a core company value. Between 2012 and 2018, we worked with apetito AG to develop a new web portal where these values can be experienced directly by B2B customers.

Solution

Since apetito already ran a portal with extensive online offerings for its customers, this platform was also intended to serve as the foundation for meinapetito.de.

The starting point was an enterprise content management software. The core of the platform needed to be the product search. With the sheer number of tables to search—along with customer data, ingredients, dishes, and menus—it had to be engineered to perform extremely well. To do this, we pulled all existing components from the apetito ERP system via API and used caching.
To ensure users could meet the highly individual needs of their guests, we added extensive filtering options to the search. Ultimately, all dishes needed to be configurable depending on allergens and dietary categories. For an optimal user experience, we designed a modern interface and unified apetito’s brand presence across platforms.

As a service-oriented company, our client also needed to provide the operating restaurants with support in preparing and presenting the dishes. With the connected file management system, it was easy to structure supporting materials and make them available for download.

So that the technical teams at apetito AG could also carry out further developments in SharePoint independently, we sent colleagues to hands-on training sessions on site. That way, we were able to work side by side with the apetito experts. As one shared team, we built all the requested features under one technological umbrella in a true partnership.

Results

A B2B portal for everything:

Today, the meinapetito.de portal brings together all the features B2B customers need to cater to their guests—and more besides!

Thanks to optimized queries and a smart mix of different caching mechanisms, the connected databases can be fully searched in real time, in under a second, and deliver the desired results for the logged-in users.
That’s where the menu planner comes in: it draws from a wide-ranging selection. This makes it easy to create meal plans for the entire year using templates—or completely tailor-made creations of your own. The finished weekly menus can even be automatically analyzed for nutritional values, balance, organic share, and cost per table guest.

Thanks to the memory function, always shop sustainably:

With the shopping cart feature, all the products needed for the previously assembled weekly plans go straight into the checkout flow—and then on to your business’s facility. To make sure your guests know what’s being served, there’s a detailed display/notice dialog. With it, you can print the completed plan, including allergen information, costs, and your individual logo.

Practical: The menu planner remembers the portions you’ve purchased and prompts you to order supplies in good time. That way, sustainable provisioning is ensured—so you always have the right amount of food on hand, neither too much nor too little. For smaller businesses that don’t have a warehouse management system, you can also use it to compile your inventory, including the number of fridges and storage space.

And there are plenty of other areas too, which guide customers and support efficient catering: for example, information material on promotional weeks or seasonal products, tabletop displays, posters, and brochures about dishes and their ingredients.

In the Help section, practical videos and a comprehensive FAQ support customers with using the apetito kitchen appliances and the menu planner. That way, both kitchen staff and table guests are always up to date.

All these varied features could be implemented within the portal thanks in particular to the partnership with the apetito development team.