The Client
Intueat is an in-home professional chef service that allows users to create a catered home dining experience with the same ease as ordering delivery. Their slogan “Host like you’re one of the guests” sums up their ultimate goal: To provide an easy way to book professional chefs who will make your next dinner party into a fine-dining experience, no cooking required.
The Ask
The idea for Intueat arose when Leo – the founder and CEO – orchestrated an in-home dining experience for his girlfriend. That special evening required dozens of calls and complex planning. While his girlfriend certainly appreciated the effort Leo put forth, he realized that most people probably wouldn’t want to jump through that many hoops just to have a nice meal at home. Because we’re not all like Leo, the idea for Intueat was born.
Leo brought his idea to our team at Brewer Digital, and our first task was brainstorming with him to determine the desired functionality and rough layout for the application. He was venturing into new territory and asking us to build something that hadn’t been done before – build a booking platform that connected professional chefs with interested customers for an in-home experience.
The process began with pencil sketches and whiteboards, and ended with high-resolution design files and a solid plan for moving into the development stage. We used those files as blueprints as our mobile app developers got to work turning those designs into functional code.
Our Solution
The Intueat application is complex: Not only do users need to be able to search by location, date, and headcount, they also need to be connected to chefs according to cuisine specialties, ratings, and pricing. The application needed to include a way to contact the chefs with questions, a way to make payments, and a robust scheduling system that would allow for accurate communication of availability to avoid booking snafus.
We chose Ruby on Rails for the back-end due to its versatility and out-of-box functionality that allowed us to customize it to our needs without a massive amount of effort. For the front-end, we chose to build with React Native. To build out the rest of the functions, we leveraged several third-party APIs including Google for maps and analytics, Facebook for analytics, Live Chat for chat, and Stripe for payment processing.
Our developers wanted to keep the software architecture as simple as possible, favoring a smart/dumb component model on the front-end and default Rails MVC architecture for the back-end. To keep the business logic clean, contained, and flexible, we also augmented the build with Service Objects.
The Successful Results
Intueat has been flourishing ever since its launch, with plans to expand nationally. The chefs are able to use our web application to respond to bookings, communicate the custom menus to their clients, and accept both deposits and full payment for their engagements. Customers are loving Intueat too, leaving rave reviews that have graced the company with a 5.0 star rating on Google.