Project · App design + Systems optimization
Ghost Kitchen Driver App
The contactless pickup system that coordinated thousands of orders a day across 26 kitchens and about 40 restaurant brands under one roof.
The situation
Colony housed 26 kitchens cooking for roughly 40 restaurant brands, all selling through DoorDash, Grubhub and the rest. Months after opening, the pandemic hit and order volume exploded into the thousands per day. The building became a zoo. Drivers stood around for half an hour asking staff where their order was; orders were missed, forgotten, or sat going cold while the driver assigned to them waited twenty feet away.
What we built
A contactless pickup system. A driver arriving scans a QR code outside the building, and staff instantly see who has arrived and which order they are there for, then bring the package out to them. During COVID that touchless flow was a requirement, not a nicety: drivers never had to enter the building at all.
This was also the first software I ever wrote. Version one was a Google Sheet pushed far past its natural life with Apps Script, automated until it behaved like an app, because the building needed something that week. It was later rebuilt as a proper web app. That progression, working system first and elegant system second, is still how the studio builds.
What changed
The half-hour waits and cold orders stopped being the norm, because staff knew the moment a driver arrived and which package to walk out. And there was a second result nobody had asked for. Colony's own business was supplying space, water and power; they had no visibility at all into what happened inside, not even how many orders their building processed or which restaurants did the volume. The system's log gave them, for the first time, a record of every order that went out the door.
