MealsHUB

Traditional food ordering platforms are typically built around established restaurants, while home chefs, food trucks, and catering businesses often need different tools and business models to participate in the same kind of digital marketplace. MealsHub's vision was to create a common marketplace where these different types of food sellers could reach customers without each one having to build and maintain its own technology platform. The challenge was to support fundamentally different vendor types — each with its own menu structure, operating hours, and order flow — while keeping a single, consistent experience for the customer. Alongside the technical challenge was a business one: keeping platform fees and overhead low enough that small food businesses could realistically participate without a large share of their revenue going to the marketplace itself.

BAMS was tasked with building the complete digital marketplace infrastructure for MealsHub: one platform for multiple food-business types, a unified discovery and ordering experience for customers, and a dedicated business-management experience for vendors. That included support for restaurants, home cooks (home-cooked meals), food trucks, and catering businesses; vendor onboarding; menu management; order management; secure payments and vendor payouts; customer accounts, reviews, and order tracking; a marketplace administration layer; and a foundation the platform could keep expanding on as more vendor types and locations came on board.

BAMS designed and built the complete MealsHub platform — public marketplace web app, vendor experience, customer experience, admin dashboard, and the underlying marketplace workflows connecting them — across a web app, a companion mobile app, and the API/backend powering both. On the customer side, the platform supports discovering vendors by city and by vendor type (restaurant, home cook, food truck, or catering), browsing menus, building an order, secure checkout, order status and tracking, reviews, and a favorites/recommendations layer for returning customers. On the vendor side, merchants can onboard, set up their own storefront and menu (including a weekly-menu structure for vendors who rotate offerings), set pricing and operating hours, manage incoming orders, and track earnings and payouts — each on their own account, independent of every other vendor on the platform. An administrative dashboard gives the MealsHub team centralized oversight of vendors, orders, content (including the platform's own blog), and platform configuration, without needing a developer involved for routine changes.

BAMS was responsible for the end-to-end development of the MealsHub platform: solution architecture, UX/UI implementation, the public marketplace web app, the companion mobile app, the vendor experience, the customer experience, the admin dashboard, the NestJS API and its data layer, vendor onboarding and menu management, order management, Stripe payment and Stripe Connect payout integration, delivery-logistics integration, location/proximity search, push/email/SMS notifications, and cloud infrastructure and deployment on AWS.

BAMS approached MealsHub as a marketplace ecosystem rather than a conventional website — an architecture that has to account for multiple participant types (customer, vendor, and platform administrator) moving through a shared flow: discovery → order → payment → fulfillment → payout. Rather than building one generic vendor model, the platform's data and UI were built around the real differences between a restaurant, a home cook, a food truck, and a catering business — each gets its own storefront, menu structure, and operating-hours model, while still appearing in the same customer-facing marketplace. Payments run through Stripe, with Stripe Connect handling the split between MealsHub and each individual merchant so vendors are paid out directly rather than through a manual reconciliation process. Delivery logistics integrate with DoorDash's Drive API rather than requiring MealsHub to build its own courier network from scratch. Administrators get a centralized dashboard over vendors, orders, and platform content, while each vendor manages their own storefront independently.

The resulting platform gives MealsHub a centralized digital foundation for connecting customers with different types of local food businesses — restaurants, home cooks, food trucks, and caterers — through one marketplace instead of requiring each vendor type to be served by a different tool. Vendors get their own onboarding, storefront, menu, order, and payout workflow; customers get one consistent place to discover and order from all of them; and MealsHub's own team gets a single administrative layer over the whole marketplace. The commission- and subscription-based pricing plans built into the platform give MealsHub a transparent, configurable fee model designed to keep platform overhead reasonable for the small food businesses that depend on it, rather than a fixed, opaque cut of every order.