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Tommy Tomato

New IT platformto enablegrowthpossibilities

  • Replatforming
  • Food
  • UX/UI design
  • Web
Tommy tomato employee delivers lunches at school

Quick overview

warm, healthy, veggie school lunches per month

200k

Industry

  • health

Teams

  • Back-end Development
  • Front-end Development
  • UI/UX Design

Deliverables

  • Web platform
  • Platform for the parents
  • Integration with Tommy Tomato logistics

Project overview

TommyTomato is on a mission to turn every child into a lifelong vegetable eater. They achieve this by providing veggie based school meals that are not just food, but part of the educational program. Beyond just meals, they offer educational programs and activities teaching children about nutrition and vegetables. This initiative creates an additional vegetable consumption moment in the day, helping children meet their recommended daily intake. Over time, TommyTomato discovered that their lunch program positively impacts other areas such as classroom tranquility, concentration, academic performance, and even reduces bullying. Furthermore, their vegetarian lunches contribute to the protein transition, and habits formed during childhood are likely to persist into adulthood, with vegetable eating being one of them.

To support their ambitious social and growth objectives, TommyTomato needed a digital infrastructure capable of facilitating this expansion. Their existing platform could no longer handle the growth. TommyTomato sought to rebuild their platform to be future-proof and flexible to adapt to new developments within the organization, such as serving new markets and target groups.

Mobile screenshot
Mockup of the Tommy Tomato platform
Tommy tomato employee in the warehouse with all the delivery boxes

Client objectives

Since its foundation in 2020, TommyTomato has expanded to 253 schools by June 2024 and has the ambition to grow to 500 schools before the end of the year. Their digital ecosystem was overwhelmed and unable to support the organisations operations and growth, with the current architecture being a major bottleneck. The existing platform, built on Ruby on Rails, needed to be replatformed in order to offer more flexibility for the organisation and future developments. TommyTomato needed to eliminate this dependency and develop a new platform based on a future-proof tech stack, managed by a partner with experience in such platforms.

Moreover, TommyTomato aimed to establish its own development team, which would work alongside Label A’s team during the project. Post-delivery, this in-house team would take over further development from Label A.

Challenges faced

Collaborating with a client-side team adds substantial contextual and market knowledge to the project. However, the main challenge in working within a "blended" team is maintaining speed and quality to deliver the new platform as per the agreed timelines. Label A's team needed to stay focused on their core responsibilities while being integrated into the client's organization to ensure that the expertise brought in was fully utilized for the primary objectives.

Tommy tomato platform mockup

Solutions Implemented

Clear agreements were made with TommyTomato’s CTO regarding the division of time and tasks to balance platform development with the onboarding, coaching, and training of the new development team. Transparent communication about progress and deliverables was crucial to managing mutual expectations and ensuring that the focus remained on the key areas requiring attention.

Results achieved

Although the project is still underway at the time of writing, it’s evident that the speed and quality of deliverables from Label A’s team have exceeded TommyTomato’s expectations. The team has successfully balanced development work with onboarding and training the TommyTomato development team, ensuring a smooth transition post-project completion.

Technologies Used

Label A employs proven technology, using widely adopted development languages and tools to avoid risks associated with non-standard choices. For this project, the front-end applications were developed using React Native, while Python was used for the back end.

Tommy tomato delivery in front of van

"In Label A, we found a partner who deeply understands our organization and the crucial areas we need to improve to achieve our goals. Translating these needs into the right technical solution for our new platform, in close collaboration with our CTO and new development team, is truly a strong suit of Label A as a partner in smart digitalization."

Bas Turk, Founder of Tommy Tomato
The digital product team of Tommy Tomato
Tommy tomato's founders

Team Composition

Sebastiaan: Scrum Master and primary contact for escalations.

Yanick: Responsible for front-end development and mentoring Tommy Tomato’s developers.

Ruben: In charge of design, ensuring a balance between user-friendliness and functionality.

Tyler: Oversees the development of the middleware layer, ensuring scalability and modularity.

Alex: Leads the back-end team, advising on strategic choices.

Hanzi: Sets up the AWS cloud environment dedicated to Tommy Tomato.

Jeffrey: Is end responsible for TommyTomato as a client.

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