Meal prep software for Vancouver, British Columbia.

Vancouver trains outdoors in the rain and eats accordingly. Seawall runners, gyms in Yaletown and Mount Pleasant, and a lot of people in one-bedroom flats with two burners and no freezer space — they all order a week of food at a time. A good share want plant-based or high-protein, and they read the macros before they read the menu. Mealforma is meal prep software that gives a Vancouver company one place to sell those plans, take the orders and see the week's numbers.

Rain and bridges are the delivery problem. From October a driver is damp all day, and the shape of the route depends on whether Lions Gate, the Ironworkers or the Granville Street Bridge is moving. Crossing False Creek twice in one afternoon costs real time, and a run over the Oak Street Bridge into Richmond is a decision rather than an afterthought. Mealforma builds each day's route from the actual orders and hands the driver the stops in order, with the customer's notes.

Metro Vancouver is a set of separate cities, not one grid. A kitchen in Mount Pleasant will serve Burnaby and North Vancouver on different days from Surrey and Langley, because the drive is nothing alike. Zones, fees, minimum orders and cut-off times are settings you change yourself — so most operators start on the Vancouver side, add the North Shore when the orders are there, and look across the Fraser only when the volume pays for the kilometres.

Plenty of customers here live in towers with a parcel room, a fob and a concierge, and they want the whole thing on their phone: choose this week's meals, skip while they are up at Whistler, pause for a month away. The storefront and the customer account do that without an email to you, and each address carries its own access notes, so a driver covering a route for the first time is not phoning the kitchen from a lobby.