Case study · Home-baker marketplace app · Chennai
Food Palette: Order today, relish tomorrow.
Food Palette let people in Chennai order fresh, homemade cakes, cupcakes, cookies and breads from the best home bakers in town, and have them delivered the next day. Kishore designed and built the Android app single-handedly. Its trickiest part was a live handshake: a home baker has to accept each order, inside five minutes, before the customer pays.
By Kishore Ravi, founder · Updated
Homemade,delivered tomorrow.
Chennai's home bakers make wonderful things, but you usually find them only through someone who already knows them. Food Palette, a Chennai partnership firm, wanted one app that put them all in front of food lovers: browse by category, choose your baker, customise the order and get it at your door.
Their promise was printed in the app's About page: order today, relish tomorrow. Everything is baked fresh for you, so orders follow a one-day delivery schedule. The app was covered in The Hindu's MetroPlus as a platform for home chefs and bakers to showcase their goodies.
Discover
Cakes, cupcakes, cookies, breads, jar cakes, vegan, gluten-free and organic bakes.
Choose a person
Every product shows which home bakers make it, and who is online right now.
Order with trust
The baker accepts first, then you pay. Points reward every order.
Tap throughFood Palette yourself.
This is the Food Palette Android app, rebuilt screen for screen from the app's own package: its layouts, icons, colours, fonts and wording. Take the tour, order a cake, watch the baker accept it and pay.
Food Palette splash screen
Pick a journey,
then tap the phone.
Every screen is rebuilt from the Food Palette Android app itself: its layouts, icons, colours, fonts and wording. Tap where you would tap on your own phone. The phone's back button works too.
A demo. Products, bakers and prices are sample data, since the live catalogue came from the Food Palette server. No order is placed and no money moves.
Six stepsfrom craving to doorstep.
A marketplace of home bakers has a problem a normal shop does not: the baker might be busy, offline or out of an ingredient. So Food Palette never takes money for an order the baker has not agreed to.
Customers see which bakers are online for each product. When they check out, the order goes to the baker first, and a five-minute clock starts. Only once the baker accepts does the app move on to payment.
Three swipesand you're in.
A three-step tour explains the idea: choose a category, pick a product or trust your favourite baker, and check out with doorstep delivery. Then sign in, create an account or use Facebook, and choose your city.
New users can enter a friend's referral code straight away and earn 25 FP points. Guests can skip sign-in and browse first.
Pick the bake,then the baker.
The home screen leads with offers and coupon codes, then the highest selling, featured, newly added and hand-picked bakes. The categories menu drops down from the top bar: cakes, cupcakes, cookies, brownies, breads, doughnuts, jar cakes, macaroons, themed cupcakes, organic, gluten-free, vegan cheese and vegan meals.
Choose a product and the app lists the bakers who make it, with their price, split into bakers available now and bakers unavailable. The product page has the photos, the baker's profile, likes, recently sold bakes, reviews, and one tap to call the baker.
Make it yours,then check out.
Customers set the quantity and add toppings with their own prices. The cart keeps a running grand total, shows the toppings inside each price, and lets items move to the wishlist. Orders under ₹700 carry a ₹100 delivery charge, and the cart says so up front.
Checkout takes billing and delivery addresses, then a delivery date and a two-hour slot, from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m., or a time of the customer's choosing.
The baker says yes,then you pay.
After checkout the order is sent to the baker and the customer sees a five-minute countdown with the order's status: pending, accepted or rejected. A push notification tells them the moment it changes.
Once accepted, the confirm screen applies FP points and coupons and shows the grand total. Payment runs through PayU inside the app. Success shows the delivery details and the points earned. A failed payment explains what happened and offers to try again.
Reasonsto order again.
FP points reward the habit. One point is worth one rupee. Here are the rules, exactly as the app shows them:
One APIper city.
The app talks to the Food Palette API over HTTPS, with one host per city, so Chennai and Bangalore could run separate catalogues of bakers. About thirty endpoints cover the whole product, from login to the baker's approval.
Bakers accept or decline orders on their side, and their decision reaches the customer's phone as a push. When a baker the customer was waiting for comes online, the app can notify them too.
Native Android,built to last.
The app is native Android, written in Java, and ran on phones from Android 4.0 onwards. This build is version 1.13.
- Native Android, in Java
- Android 4.0 and later
- Support libraries: AppCompat, RecyclerView, CardView, Design
- Picasso and OkHttp for images and networking
- Proxima Nova typeface throughout
- SQLite for saved notifications
- Shake the phone to add to the cart
- Call the baker from the product page
- Sticky product header and image pager
- Swipeable tour and product images
- Wishlist, likes and reviews
- Food Palette API over HTTPS, one host per city
- PayU payment gateway
- Google Cloud Messaging push
- Facebook login and sharing
- Google Analytics and Tag Manager
- Baker approval within five minutes
- ₹100 delivery under ₹700
- FP points earn and redeem rules
- Coupons and referral codes
- Delivery slots from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m.
The small touchespeople noticed.
Food Palette was built around people, not a warehouse, so the details are about the baker and the buyer getting along.
Shippedand in the paper.
Food Palette shipped on Google Play, with an iOS app on the App Store, and was featured in The Hindu's MetroPlus.
Shipped
- Product design and the order flow with live baker approval
- Android app, version 1.13
- Covered in The Hindu MetroPlus
Which services made Food Palette work?
The services behind this project. Each one has its own page, with more work and answers.
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