TheChefClub

Services: Systems, Full-Stack Development
Sector: Hospitality & food
Year: 2025

Introduction

TheChefClub is a catering brand for mid-sized celebrations and company events in Barcelona. It works like Uber: the brand, the experience and the payment are theirs, and partner kitchens do the cooking. But booking worked like everywhere else in the trade: a form, a phone call and a quote put together by hand in a spreadsheet. The founder ran it all alone, so every new event was more of his time. To grow without hiring, hosts had to be able to build their event without him.

The builder

Quoting a catering goes from days to minutes, like filling a cart

El configurador en un móvil en la mano: el primer paso, diseña tu evento, con las plantillas para particulares

TheChefClub’s hosts do not live in apps: they are people turning sixty at home or planning the office Christmas lunch. So we designed in Figma something that needs no instructions: three steps (pick a template, add dishes, save the quote) and a price per person that is always in sight and moves with every dish and every guest.

You can start from scratch or from a ready-made event and edit it. The catalogue, more than a hundred and fifty dishes plus drinks, tableware, furniture and staff, is sorted by the moments of the event, and we built it in Next.js so it feels like a shop and not like a form.

The event

One link per event, no passwords, with everything the kitchen needs to know

La página del presupuesto: fecha, hora y lugar con el mapa, y a la derecha el precio final y el botón para pagar la señal

On saving, the quote becomes a page of its own with a unique link, no accounts, no passwords: an SMS code on the phone is enough. From there the host edits it, shares it with anyone, writes on WhatsApp or calls, and pays the deposit through Stripe to hold the date.

The same page collects what a caterer usually asks three times: date and time, the address (Google Maps works out the travel from the kitchen), the guests, the children’s menu, allergies and intolerances, and what the house is like: whether there is a fridge, a hob or an oven, room to plate, or a distance between kitchen and table. A week before the event everything locks, and what gets served no longer changes.

The back office

One founder, no office staff, able to take on four times the work

Behind it there is no bespoke admin panel to maintain but Airtable, set up as a real database (until then everything lived in a spreadsheet). There the client changes dishes, prices and templates without touching code, and every quote lands as a record with its products, its status (quoted, booked, paid) and every detail of the event.

Once an event is paid it reaches the partner kitchen with all it needs to serve it: the menu, the quantities, the address, the allergies and the kitchen it will find. TheChefClub keeps what makes the business its own, the brand and the relationship with the customer, and the work that used to grow with every event no longer asks for more hours: it can now take on four times the load with the same structure.