Honey Bee Meals
Meal Prep Delivery

THRIVING THROUGH TECHNOLOGY

Now, Honey Bee Meals complete hundreds of deliveries for thousands of meals every week.

“Our food stays fresh for three days,” Amy says. “We always service deliveries twice a week and produce for two days. Our cycle’s cook and deliver, cook, and deliver.”

At the start, Amy had to print orders manually to know what to put in everyone’s’ bags and highlight relevant orders in different colors.

“I called that my hours and hours of ‘arts and crafts,’” she laughs.

As Honey Bee Meals thrived, Amy started looking into improvements for her business. “I identify with a lot of operational issues that have been solved by technology,” she shares.

ORDER AND DELIVERY MANAGEMENT

Shopify is the ecommerce platform upon which Honey Bee Meal’s website is built. The platform helps customers order meals seamlessly, and also allowed Amy to do some coding herself and make customizations. She also started using Routific, a routing software for deliveries, and worked with their head of logistics.

The two software platforms operated separately. This meant that Amy had to export data from Shopify and import it into Routific - and pray that it worked.

But sometimes the data transfer didn’t work out and more often than not, Amy had to manually intervene. Her precious time was eaten up by tedious work: converting rows of Shopify data on Excel into a format suitable for Routific.

On top of taking up hours of her time which could be spent on meal preps or better recipes, it meant that there was a possibility of human error. A single error could mean lots of angry customers, messed up meals, and wrong deliveries.

HOW AFI LABS INTEGRATED ROUTIFIC WITH SHOPIFY FOR BETTER ORDER MANAGEMENT

Thankfully, “Afi Labs helped us navigate some challenges, such as integrating Shopify with the Routific platform” Amy says.

Responding to this problem of seamless data transfer, Afi Labs built an integration so that Honey Bee Meals could send customer address data from Shopify into Routific automatically. What took hours now took seconds. More importantly, she could import the addresses back to Shopify in route optimal order so that her staff could load the meals from first stop to last, so that her drivers would not need to scramble to find the customer’s order when they arrive at an address.

Amy explains: “We have orders coming in every week, and they change. Order data needs to be sent to the kitchen so the cooks know what to make. The same data needs to be sent to the delivery software to be routed. There are lots of things that need to talk to each other seamlessly without us humans inputting stuff!”

PROVIDING GREAT CUSTOMER SUPPORT

Another area where technology helps Honey Bee Meals is in providing great customer support.

Amy’s team receives a lot of questions and fielding them is a challenge, especially when there are so many channels of communication. Customers could make enquires via text, email, Instagram, or Facebook.

“Making sure we are on top of everything and that everyone is happy is a big challenge every day,” Amy says. “We’re in the service business - we serve people.”

With Afian and his team’s help, Amy could now field questions more effectively.

For instance, the website now has a postal code lookup. This means customers can find out themselves if Honey Bee Meals deliver to their area. “That’s eliminating some customer service inquiries,” Amy says.