Feeding facilities is a different business from home lunch boxes. The kindergarten (facility account) places the order, not a parent in a separate app. The child has a diet, and the same person who orders also corrects the day's list.

If you still collect that by phone and email, catering software must first unload the office and kitchen before production starts. Everything else is extra.

Who places the order — and why that changes the system

In the preschool model the facility knows the children's list and group diets. A parent can get a public link to the published menu (no login), but does not place the order.

That is why a facility panel matters more than a parent app. The facility builds the order (breakfast, lunch, dinner), the system enforces two deadlines, and the kitchen gets a day report instead of an SMS thread.

Cutoff times are part of the product

Without a hard cutoff everyone calls in an exception. The kitchen does not know whether to cook 47 or 52 portions. In practice there are two deadlines: full edits the day before, then a shorter correction window on delivery day — after the second cutoff the facility cannot save (a manager still can).

Between the deadlines breakfast is locked; lunch and dinner may only correct diets that were already on the pre-deadline snapshot — not free “add-ons after the fact”. That is how the day report, labels and packing list in route order come from the same numbers.

If the facility places nothing, the system can copy the last order onto the next working day — in the window between deadlines. That does not replace “child not eating today”, but it removes the empty sheet.

Child, diet and the day's order must be one record

A gluten-free meal for a child without that diet, or a standard lunch for an allergy, almost never comes from bad intent. It comes from the children's list living in one place and diets in another.

In the panel a child has a diet, and the day's order is specific people on specific meals. “John is not eating” means removing them from that order — there is no separate attendance module. The UI mainly shows children with a diet code; the server still trusts what the facility saves, so a tidy child record is a condition, not magic.

What this means

  • The facility places the order; a parent can get a published-menu link, with no account.
  • Two deadlines are enforced on save — not by “please don't call”.
  • The child's diet and the line on the order are one process. There is no separate attendance register.