Food and Delivery - SaaS
mipOS Dark Kitchen: +400 Productivity
From mipOS we discovered that there was a large unattended food sector. A restaurant dedicated to Dark Kitchen (hidden kitchens) can have, on average, +10 brands of different types of food (Mexican, Asian, Peruvian, etc.) that are activated or deactivated according to the seasonality of the day. However, each brand must have a tablet provided by each delivery app.
- Challenge
Revolutionizing Dark Kitchen management
A restaurant with +30 virtual brands can have +90 tablets to manage its Dark Kitchen. Each tablet is associated to a Delivery app like Uber Eats, How to solve this problem by reducing 90 tablets to one?
Results
- +400% productivity increase in Dark Kitchen management.
- +80% delivery of correct orders to diners.
Team by Comandos
- 5 developers
- 1 product designer
- 1 User Research
- Adventure
Where to start to provide value to users?
Getting ready: Where are we? and What will we need?
We visited +10 Dark Kitchens to get a first-hand look at their operation, how they organize their day-to-day operations and how they manage their kitchen from inventory management to delivering a ready dish to a delivery app.
We focused on increasing Dark Kitchen productivity and a user experience as easy as opening a piece of candy.
- Seeing the mountain
What is the focus of this product?
After analyzing the entire user journey and the huge productivity pain of the Dark Kitchen, we focused our efforts on:
- Productivity: Eliminate the management of 90 tablets and concentrate efforts on a single screen.
- Retention: What do concealed kitchens really need after having everything on a tablet?
Step 01: Defining an MVP to validate ideas
First we went deep into the operation of a Dark Kitchen to think like a Dark Kitchen restaurant and from there we created a User Journey as a treasure map. With this defined we started to create low resolution prototypes to validate and iterate our ideas.
Understanding the life cycle of fresh food, how and when to replenish the warehouse as sales increase or are maintained were key insights for mipOS.
Step 02: Several iterations with earlier adopters
Starting with a low resolution prototype and many times doing Wizard of Oz to test ideas with early product enthusiasts got us moving quickly and in a matter of 2 weeks we had everything ready to make an engineered MVP.
We focus on making a summary or detail of an order very clear and accurate for both a manager and a day-to-day operator.
One of the sticking points was the overall visualization of all the orders coming in from all the Delivery apps. Considering Dark Kitchen had 30+ virtual brands at a time, we solved it with one word in mind: transparency.
- Making top
A product that customers loved from the start
After many usability tests and 13 general iterations, the result surprised even the most conservative: +400% productivity in one week, considering customers who gave up all tablets to use mipOS in their operation.
We created a special menu and brand configurator. Imagine having “HotDogs Don Pepito” with a different menu for each Delivery Apps where you can activate and deactivate at your convenience. All from a single device.
We optimize the registration flow to mipOS Dark Kitchen, maintaining transparency in the promise of value at all times.
- A product adopted to work on any tablet.tablet.
- Productivity: +400% at Dark Kitchen, which had been operating with many tablets.
- Retention: +70% after setting up your first Delivery Apps in less than 2 days.