Meal prep software for Seattle, Washington.

Seattle buys meal prep on weekday time. The tech offices in South Lake Union and Bellevue keep people at a desk through lunch, the climbing gyms, rowing clubs and lifting gyms across Ballard and Capitol Hill produce customers who plan their food, and the hospitals on First Hill run shifts that no restaurant fits. Mealforma is meal prep software that gives a Seattle company one place to sell weekly plans, take the orders before the cut-off and see what the kitchen has to cook.

Geography makes the route. Seattle is cut in half by a ship canal with four bridges that open for boats, split again by Lake Washington, and stacked on hills steep enough that Queen Anne and Magnolia are their own errands. West Seattle is a bridge away; Bainbridge and Vashon are a ferry. Mealforma builds each day's route from the orders that are actually in and gives the driver the stops in order, so the crossings happen once rather than four times.

That is why zones matter more here than in a flat city. North of the canal on one day, the Eastside on another, West Seattle on a third — each with its own delivery days, windows and fee, all settings you change yourself. An island run is the same idea with a ferry sailing in the middle of it: give it its own cut-off and its own window, so the schedule decides what gets promised rather than the driver.

Seattle customers are comfortable running their own account. They pick meals before the cut-off, skip a week for a trip and change an address themselves. A lot of them live in apartment buildings with a package room, a code and a specific door, and a driver on a wet December afternoon should not be phoning to ask. The note the customer wrote stays with the stop in the driver app, which keeps working in a parking garage with no signal.