The Problem & Cultural Vision
For the African and Caribbean diaspora across Australia, sourcing authentic traditional dishes and native culinary ingredients was historically fraught with fragmentation. Independent home chefs and cultural caterers lacked digital storefronts, leaving communities dependent on disjointed social media groups and word-of-mouth.
To solve this, we engineered Afro-Caribbean Meals (ACM), Australia's first dedicated dual marketplace bridging authentic prepared cuisine delivery with traditional raw pantry e-commerce.
Dual Marketplace & Geospatial Discovery
A central engineering challenge was harmonizing two distinct consumer journeys: immediate, hot restaurant/caterer delivery alongside dry packaged seasonings and cookware shipping.
I engineered a high-performance geospatial search pipeline indexed by Australian postal codes (such as Parramatta NSW), pairing real-time caterer kitchen availability, distance matrix estimates, and cultural authenticity badges to deliver sub-second search results.
Order Lifecycle & Multi-Vendor Architecture
The ordering pipeline was built with full transparency, managing customizable meal portions, add-ons, transparent service commission fees, and direct delivery routing.
The underlying catalog and database architecture were engineered to effortlessly scale, structured to support a prospective multi-vendor ecosystem of 500+ verified caterers, 50+ regional cuisines, and over 25,000+ prospective customers nationwide.
The Stack and Infrastructure
The technical architecture of Afro-Caribbean Meals was engineered for high availability, search visibility, and seamless commerce workflows. The frontend is built with Next.js and deployed on Vercel, utilizing server-side rendering and incremental static regeneration for instant discovery and optimized Core Web Vitals. The UI is crafted with Tailwind CSS and shadcn/ui for an accessible, mobile-first ordering experience. On the backend, I architected and independently managed an Express.js REST API backed by MongoDB on a DigitalOcean droplet, handling multi-vendor catalogs, geo-queries, and cart checkout pipelines designed to scale to a potential audience of 25,000+ users.
