Food and Delivery — SaaS

mipOS Dark Kitchen: +400% Productivity

FoodTech product design for mipOS Dark Kitchen. Consolidated 40+ tablets from Uber Eats, Rappi, and Didi Food into one screen.

Impact: +200 clients
Timeline: Product in 4 months

mipOS Dark Kitchen management SaaS on laptop — Menú General, Menú Uber Eats and Menú Rappi columns with categorías, productos, modificadores and per-country delivery-app toggles (Uber Eats, Glovo, Rappi, Didi Food) for Mexican, Asian and Peruvian virtual brands unified on one device

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?

I want to grow as mipOS

Results

+400% productivity increase in Dark Kitchen management.
+80% delivery of correct orders to diners.

The team

5 developers
1 product designer by Comandos
1 User Research

mipOS Dark Kitchen Ordenes dashboard — 99% order-integration counter with live Uber Eats, Didi Food, Rappi and iFood incoming orders, Rechazar / Aceptar actions and Lista para entrega status on a single screen

Adventure

Where to start to provide value to users?

mipOS Dark Kitchen field research (2019) — 10+ delivery-app tablets for Uber Eats, Didi Food, Rappi and iFood pinned to a wooden wall and wired chaotically, the operational pain mipOS set out to replace with a single screen — The Dark Kitchen tablet wall — the operational pain mipOS was built to replace with a single screen.

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.

mipOS Dark Kitchen treasure-map user journey — six-stage loop of Register, Delivery App's, Menu, Receive orders, Order status and Delivery used to scope the MVP around the Dark Kitchen operator flow

mipOS Dark Kitchen comisariato field research — hair-netted kitchen staff handling fresh produce in yellow and red crates inside a walk-in cooler, informing the inventory-replenishment insights that shaped the product

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.

mipOS Dark Kitchen order-detail ticket — Didi Food E2691 with 7 items (Signature Club House, McTrío Mediano BBQ Crispy Onion, Paquete 8 Para dos, 4x3 McFlurrys de Oreo, Paquete especial 4 hamburguesas + 2 papas), total $1,519.00 and a Progreso del pedido timeline from Pedido aceptado to Entrega de la orden — The order-detail ticket — a clean summary for both a Dark Kitchen manager and a day-to-day kitchen operator.

Transparency as a single-word north star — every delivery app and every virtual brand in one queue.

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.

The menu and brand configurator — every Delivery App menu activated or deactivated for every virtual brand from a single device.

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.

mipOS Dark Kitchen onboarding — Regístrate screen to select and integrate Uber Eats, Rappi, Didi Food, iFood, Pedidos Ya, Glovo and Justo delivery apps with per-app activation timeframe, the transparency lever that lifted retention to 70% — Optimised registration flow — a Dark Kitchen goes live on its first Delivery Apps in under 2 days.

We optimize the registration flow to mipOS Dark Kitchen, maintaining transparency in the promise of value at all times.

A product that revolutionized Dark Kitchen management

+400% productivity in one week: Dark Kitchens that gave up 90+ delivery-app tablets to run on mipOS saw a +400% productivity jump in a single week.
+80% correct orders delivered: Orders reached the right diner, right brand, right Delivery App — no cross-wires across 30+ virtual brands.
+70% retention after first setup: New operators stayed with mipOS after setting up their first Delivery Apps in under 2 days.