Meal prep software for Chicago, Illinois.

Chicago buys meal prep hardest in January and keeps buying through March. Winter takes away the casual cooking habit and the casual gym habit at the same time, and a box that arrives on Sunday fixes both. The rest of the year the demand is steady: hospital staff in Streeterville and on the West Side, people who train before work in the West Loop and Lincoln Park, and households in Lakeview and Logan Square where the kitchen is the size of a hallway. Mealforma is the software a Chicago company sells and runs all of that on.

Winter is the delivery problem and it lasts. Snow narrows a street to one lane, the salt trucks own the arterials, and between the overnight parking ban and dibs a familiar block stops being familiar. Most of the North Side is three-flats and walk-ups with a shared vestibule and a buzzer, and downtown is towers with a package room. Mealforma gives the driver the stops in order with the customer's own note — unit, buzzer, back stairs — and a photo at the drop, and the app holds the route when the signal does not.

The grid helps and the expressways do not. A run up Milwaukee or Western is predictable; the Kennedy and the Eisenhower at five o'clock are not, and Lake Shore Drive is the first thing to go in weather. The city is around twenty-five miles top to bottom, so a North Side day and a South Side day are genuinely different days. Delivery zones, delivery days, cut-off times and fees are settings you change yourself, so splitting the city — or adding Evanston and Oak Park — is a zone, not a rebuild.

Chicago customers manage the whole thing from their phone: choose this week's meals, swap one, skip the week they are out of town, pause for the summer. Letting them do that themselves is the difference between a subscription that survives August and one you have to win back in September. A large share of the city orders in Spanish, and the storefront, the customer account and the emails are translated, so a customer picks their language once and keeps it without anything about their plan changing.