Meal prep software for Raleigh, North Carolina.

Raleigh's customers come from three places at once. NC State fills Hillsborough Street with students and staff who eat on a schedule, Research Triangle Park and the offices along I-40 send engineers and sales people who work through lunch, and WakeMed, Duke Raleigh and UNC Rex run shifts that do not line up with a kitchen. Mealforma is meal prep software that gives a Raleigh company one place to sell weekly plans to all three, take the orders and see the week's numbers.

The map keeps moving. A shop that starts inside the Beltline has customers in Cary and Apex within a year, then Holly Springs, Wake Forest and Knightdale, and the drive between them is not short — I-440 and Capital Boulevard both back up at the end of the day, and US 1 north is its own kind of slow. Mealforma builds each day's route from the orders that are actually in, gives the driver the stops in order with the customer's notes, and takes a photo on delivery.

Adding a town should not be a project. Delivery zones, fees, cut-off times and delivery windows are settings you change yourself, so a Raleigh company that has been running a Sunday route inside the Beltline can open a Wednesday route for Cary and Morrisville without a migration or a call to support. Most shops here grow that way — one zone at a time, in the direction the orders came from.

Raleigh customers behave like subscribers. They sign up for a weekly plan, pick their meals before the cut-off, and expect to skip a week from their phone when they are away. The university calendar shows up in the numbers too: a student plan empties in May and refills in August. Skips, pauses and plan changes happen in the customer's own account, so a quiet August does not arrive as fifty emails on a Friday afternoon.