Plated Foodservice

The product

Plated Foodservice runs meal service in care facilities. In each kitchen there's a tablet running a terminal application that drives custom heating hardware, helps staff track food inventory, and syncs with backend services in real time. The stakes are unusually concrete for software: if a message gets dropped somewhere between the kitchen and the backend, a resident doesn't get fed.

I've been one of the engineers behind it at Midwestern Interactive since the product had a two-person engineering team. It has five now.

What I built

The terminal, from scratch. An Electron application in TypeScript — the interface facility staff actually touch, and the piece that talks to the heating hardware. Desktop-app engineering with an embedded twist: the software has to keep behaving when the hardware, the network, or the humans around it don't.

The messaging pipeline. Orders and status data flow bidirectionally between terminals and the backend over an AWS SQS and Lambda pipeline I designed. Queues fit this problem for a boring, important reason: facility networks are not something you get to control, and durable, retryable delivery beats hoping the connection was up.

The infrastructure as code. Terraform modules provisioning the platform's AWS footprint — Lambda, S3, ECS — so environments are reproducible and infrastructure changes are versioned and reviewable rather than tribal knowledge.

The API and admin portal. An Express API with Amazon Cognito authentication, and the Next.js portal facility staff use to manage organizations, inventory, resident records, and equipment monitoring.

The other half of the job

Agency work means the engineering is only part of it. I work directly with client stakeholders every day on scoping, technical trade-offs, and delivery, and I've been part of the architecture decisions, sprint planning, and retrospectives that took the product from two engineers to a five-person team over two and a half years.