Ezlunch - healthy, convenient good for school kids

Worried about the lack of nutritious food options available for school children and tired of the difficulties of making school lunches, Sandra Finlay created an online school lunch ordering service.

“The best ideas come from a need,” says Sandra. “School lunches are hard for parents: you get home at the end of the day and the bread’s gone mouldy or you need to go shopping … I was also concerned about the amount of convenience foods I saw in kids’ lunch boxes when I went on school trips.”

 So she set out to solve both problems by using local cafes to offer fresh, additive-free lunches through an online system.

 Convenience

“The system had to be so convenient parents could do it at the last minute,” says Sandra. “Once I started thinking about it, an automated system and an e-business model was the only choice.”

 Sandra based her payment model on Trade Me’s seller model. Parents create an account, and top it up via credit card, internet banking or debit card. Orders can be placed online or via text up to 9am on the day and the cost is debited from the account.  An automated response reminds you if you need to top up your account.

 While parents were happy to order online, focus groups revealed that the students, particularly teenagers, would prefer to be able to text in their orders.

 “When we mentioned texting they all perked up,” says Sandra. So she got her developer to create a mobile app that is based around users’ favourite combos.

“They can save up to nine favourite combos and then they just text a two-digit code to order that meal.”

 The system also had to be convenient for schools and for the cafes providing the meals.

 “Schools don’t want a lot of admin around lunches in their day,” says Sandra.

 A class monitor still distributes the lunches at some schools and others give out the food at the tuckshop, but ezlunch has removed the need for schools to take orders and collect money from students.

The cafes that provide the food also have the administrative side taken care of by ezlunch.

They simply log in to the system in the morning and get their production list for the day. A custom app installed locally at the cafes also prints out all the labels for the bags with the child’s name, school, room number and food order.  The production list can be viewed a week ahead so the cafes can estimate what they need to buy ahead of time.

The cafes have set menus with a commission fee for ezlunch built in and a ‘lunch box fee’ to cover credit card payments.

 Healthy options
Sandra says the biggest challenge was deciding how to produce the food and get it out to schools. At one stage she considered starting her own kitchen and producing the food herself.

 “But my web developer said to me one day that the power of the web was to connect local to local. I am forever grateful to him for saying that.”

That was when she started contacting local cafes that already offered the healthy food options she was committed to providing, and that could deliver to a cluster of schools within their area. She currently has five cafes serving close to 30 schools.

The menu students and parents can select from always includes vegetarian, gluten-free, nut-free and dairy-free options, and all the food is freshly made and, as much as possible, free from additives and preservatives.

Developing the ezlunch site

When it came to designing the site there was no off-the-shelf product that had the functionality she needed, says Sandra. “The system needed to be able to account for a family that might have children at different schools or at the same school but in different rooms. But they needed to be able to log in and make one simple order and payment for multiple addresses.”

Sandra chose a developer who had experience creating complex systems, but who had not done much work in the retail side of development.

“He really believed in what I was doing and he has contributed a great deal to the product.” she says.

As with many online products, ezlunch is always under development, but Sandra says big changes were made around usability in the beginning.

“You just can’t know everything that is going to work or not work until you get people using the product. Things that made sense to us were difficult for people to use.”

 For example, Sandra says that there was initially quite a bit of confusion about what date people had ordered the food from.

Selecting from a calendar, which seemed like an obvious choice, was not working. So the site now has a prompt that allows the user to choose “today”, “tomorrow”, or “choose another day”, the last taking people to a calendar where they select a specific date.

 “That has stopped the confusion. With a system as complex as this, I would recommend that people start small, trialling their product and bringing on new customers slowly until you have ironed these kinds of things out. If I had started with 30 schools my help line would have been ringing off the hook and I wouldn’t have been able to keep up with the business’s demands.”

Another critical usability factor has been the different browsers people use to access the ezlunch service.

“That’s been a really big part of our testing. Something that looks perfect in one browser can have the formatting out of line on another. So now we test everything in every browser that our reporting tools tell us our customers are using.”

 Creating a community

Sandra is now starting to put more time into creating a community around the service through newsletters, a blog and social media. Because people must sign up to ezlunch using an email address, she already had a good database.

“We didn’t want to be relying on schools to get information to parents, so their email gives us a direct route to contact them.”

She has been using newsletter service MailChimp to send the newsletters and says that the reporting tools are fantastic. “They tell us how many people have clicked through to the site, what links they’ve used, it’s been really helpful.”

The site also has a blog that features a nutritionist and other experts. Articles are linked through to Facebook and are also on the home page of the public site.

Facebook has been helpful in getting people to share information with their friends, says Sandra.

“A lot of what the business is about is educating people in a really easy way about nutrition issues. The blog is great for those kinds of serious articles, and Facebook allows us to communicate in a more informal, fun way with people.”

She has engaged a social media strategist to help with this aspect of the business and also a PR consultant to help get media attention.

“It’s a really good idea to have those key people that can help in the specific areas that they are experts in rather than trying to do it all yourself,” she says.

Taking ezlunch to the world

Currently, ezlunch is serving schools in Auckland, but Sandra intends to extend that to the rest of the country and overseas.

 “I really need to get in touch with Jamie Oliver,” she laughs. But that might not actually be such a far-fetched idea. There is no reason why the service couldn’t work in any other country, she says.

She was recently amongst a select number of businesses that were asked to present their businesses to previous winners of the Veuve Clicquot businesswoman of the year.

 “People were very supportive of it and said they could see it working particularly well in the UK market. Parents all over the world are facing the same problems – it’s about getting decent food into kids, and having a system that is workable, convenient and not a compromise.”

Another aspect of the company’s expansion is the technology itself and Sandra is currently splitting the brand into ezlunch – the service – and ezsystems – the technology behind the service.

“Basically, the product can be skinned and used by a school or supplier to potentially order uniforms, run tuckshop ordering and pay school fees, and there are other potential markets out there too.”

 “At the moment I’m working out what the best model for that part of the business is – whether it’s a percentage or a regular payment, but there is certainly a lot of potential for a product that can provide this level of ordering complexity. As far as I know it is one of a kind.”

 Learning every step of the way

Sandra funded the project herself (“Thank you, mortgage!”) and with some government technology funding help, allowing her to access expert advice and guidance.

She says every step of setting up ezlunch contained a lesson.

 “I did a lot of detailed planning before we started, but then there are some things you have to learn as you go, and I think the business is better for it.

“Things change and you need to adapt to that and just stay focused on making the best decision for the need in front of you at the time.

“All of those decisions have got ezlunch to where it is now – and I’m pretty happy with that.”

http://www.ezlunch.co.nz/