Foodbox

What is Foodbox?

Foodbox is a reverse engineered mealbox delivery platform that enables local food store owners and / or producers to go into the mealbox business without the hassle of manually writing recipes that match with the ingredients they have in stock.

How does it work?

In Foodbox ingredients are treated as first class citizens[1] whereas recipes become facilitating entities, which is the reverse of how things are usually done / a human brain will naturally approach the sensation "hmm, what shall i eat tonight".

The system is equipped with a large recipe database, all ingredients converted to the metric system. Stock mutations trigger incremental updates that mark each recipe as "possible" or "impossible" based on the current and possibly future combination of products in stock which in turn can generate a "product catalog" consisting of recipes that the owner can place in the store, which can be done on a per recipe basis or implicitly by enabling all recipes by default.

[1] I borrowed the term first class citizen from programming language design terminology but to two are not related in any way.

Personalization

Ingredient data is enriched with nutritional properties, linked to a collection of diets and allergies which in turn allows the end user to automatically filter out any recipes that are undesirable, done trough filtering or by specification in their store profile. Furthermore, the system keeps track of both viewed and purchased recipes which directly influences the sorting of products based on their own behavior and indirectly by comparing their preferences with other clients that behave correspondingly.

Stock management

Ingredients are classified in a way that makes stock management less tedious. Products can be marked as "always in stock", "not in stock but can be obtained" and "fresh stock" so most of the time only the latter, which is usually a relatively short list, requires frequent adjustments.

Introduction

Like so many people, my days fly by and more often then i should i cheat a bit by going for the takeaway/delivery option. My motivation for doing so is not exclusively driven by time, the financial aspect also plays a role, which it shouldn't. We all love good food don't we? Considering the state of the planet we live on it is my opinion that food should be, by law, sold in any desired quantity a customer desires. It has always been like this up until the rise of the supermarket and the only reason why the current situation is differently is profit, for supermarket owners that is.

If people have the choice i am pretty sure most of them prefer to put healthy stuff inside their stomach. It is this