Meal prep software for Dallas, Texas.

Dallas drives, and it trains. Uptown and Deep Ellum fill with people who work downtown and get to the gym before it; Lakewood, Preston Hollow and the whole run north through Richardson to Plano and Frisco are full of households where both adults work and nobody wants to cook on a Wednesday. Corporate relocations keep adding more of them every year. They all buy the same thing — a week of meals, ordered once. Mealforma is the software a Dallas company sells and runs that on.

Distance and highways are the delivery problem here. Central Expressway, the Dallas North Tollway and LBJ are the realistic ways north, and any of them can turn a twenty-minute run into an hour between four and seven. Summer sits above a hundred degrees for weeks at a time, so chilled food cannot ride around while a driver improvises an order of stops. Mealforma builds each day's route from the orders that are actually locked, gives the driver the stops in order with the customer's notes, and takes a photo at the door.

A Dallas kitchen rarely stays inside Dallas. Customers appear in Richardson and Plano, then Frisco, Allen and McKinney; the other direction reaches Irving, Grand Prairie and Arlington, and Fort Worth is its own market an hour west. Running that as one route does not work. Delivery zones, delivery days, cut-off times and fees are settings you change in admin, so the northern suburbs get their own Tuesday and the southern ones their own Thursday without a second system to keep in step.

Uptown, Victory Park and the Design District are buildings with a gate, a lobby and a package room; the northern suburbs are neighborhoods with a call box at the entrance. The note a customer writes once — gate code, building, leave it with the concierge — travels with every order to the driver's phone. Customers choose this week's meals, swap one, skip a week or pause for a trip from their own account, and a good share of Dallas customers do all of it in Spanish.