At Kapybara Tech we believe in iteratively building the best solution for each customer. This is our journey with Healthy Soba Iki!
Healthy Soba Iki is an authentic soba restaurant (and my favourite soba restaurant) in Raffles place, Singapore. It is owned and run by a Japanese chef. The restaurant emphasises using 100% buckwheat flour to make the soba noodles. He also makes sarashina soba (the outer core of the buckwheat seed is milled away and only the centre is used for the flour).
This results in incredibly chewy and springy noodles. The combination of using 100% buckwheat flour (most restaurants use a percentage of flour mixed with buckwheat four) coupled with the fact that sarashina soba is used makes this restaurant one of a kind, with top quality ingredients. This authenticity has been validated by the throngs of loyal Japanese customers you will see patronising the store when you visit!
During the circuit breaker period last year, takeaways and deliveries became necessary for business survival. Ikisobatakeaway.com was built to support this necessity. We built version 1 of the solution quickly to first support online orders.
The first version worked as such:
- Customer places an order
- Chef get notified of the order and details through email/Slack
- Chef books the order using a delivery service such as Lalamove
A few problems quickly arose. Being the chef and owner, it was a hassle to handle delivery bookings manually (imagine having to cook, pause and arrange a delivery using lalamove during the peak period). Furthermore, there were some mistakes in fulfilling orders especially during the rush hour, since it was difficult to keep track of order details delivered on a phone application.
In summary the pain points were:
- It was a hassle to manually book delivery orders and key in order details, and handle customer queries online
- Orders came in through email/Slack notifications which were a deviation from restaurant operations (receipt system)
To solve these problems, we integrated delivery bookings with a dashboard, allowing automatic scheduling of delivery orders when it arrived. We also built a receipt printer system (using a raspberry pi to expose the printer securely to the internet) and exposed the print service as a secure API. Hence on top of getting notifications upon receiving a new order, a receipt is also printed in the restaurant itself – integrating with the daily processes of the restaurant! The process is now:
- Customer places an order on https://ikisobatakeaway.com
- The order is saved and displayed a dashboard
- A driver is booked according to the chosen delivery time
- A receipt is printed in the restaurant
Here’s a simple demonstration! The receipt is printed manually for demonstration purposes in this video
