Order Fulfillment App

The problem

Nude Foods launched Boulder's first zero-waste grocery by delivery in the middle of lockdown. Orders came in; the packing floor ran on exported spreadsheets. Workers packed from poorly formatted sheets where it was easy to miss that a line said quantity two and pack one. Jar deposits, the heart of a zero-waste operation, could only be refunded by escalating up the chain. Every mistake became a customer email and a redelivery.

What we built

A packing and delivery app shaped around the actual mistakes. The packing view puts one order in front of a worker at a time and highlights the fields people miss: a quantity above one gets a color so nobody packs a single jar of something twice ordered. Drivers get their route as an efficient sequenced loop, capture a proof-of-delivery photo at each stop, and can issue jar-deposit refunds on the spot instead of passing them up the chain. Customers and staff get automated notifications as orders move.

Inside Nude Foods the system goes by PAPPY. The first version was an automated Google Sheet, built in a couple of weeks so the store could operate. It grew into the web app that runs the floor today.

What changed

The floor got back the two days a week one person had been spending rearranging spreadsheets by hand — about a thousand hours a year, worth tens of thousands of dollars in labor. Mispacks and jar-refund escalations stopped turning into customer emails and redeliveries. The system has now run for about five years and is still going, with a crew of five packers and drivers handling the week’s orders. The store stayed on a monthly retainer, and the app keeps getting updates through the year as the operation changes. For a lockdown-era startup build, the strongest number is the simplest one: it never stopped being used.