20+ restaurants, 14 days — pivoting to delivery overnight when Covid hit

In March 2020 dining rooms across the country closed overnight. For 20+ restaurants we worked with — neighbourhood places without a delivery muscle — the only way to keep cooking, keep paying staff, and keep their place in their community was to become a delivery business in two weeks. None of them had the infrastructure for it.

What we built

A delivery-business stack that any of the restaurants could be running in days, not months. A simple ordering site per restaurant, on its own brand. Payment processing on day one. A kitchen view that turned an order into a ticket on the line. A dispatch flow that handled their own drivers and the third-party platforms together. Menus, hours, and stock changes pushed by the chef without a developer in the loop. The hardest part of the launch — figuring out the model — we’d done already; each restaurant inherited the playbook.

How we built it

A Next.js delivery storefront on Vercel, one tenant per restaurant, deployed from a shared template so each launch was hours not weeks. Stripe handled payments from day one. n8n stitched the ordering, kitchen, and dispatch flows together — and integrated with the third-party delivery platforms that the restaurants needed alongside their own channel. The chefs got a dashboard for menus, hours, and stock; everything else ran in the background.

The outcome

Twenty-plus independent restaurants got through the closure with a working delivery business — one many of them kept running once dining rooms reopened, because the channel had paid for itself. The work was about software the way a fire extinguisher is about chemistry: it kept something important from burning down.