A US fast-casual chain's mobile ordering platform โ iOS and Android, pickup and delivery, real-time order tracking, and a Flavor Bank rewards system that turns every dollar spent into a reason to come back โ delivered in five months. The platform was designed to make ordering faster, simplify repeat purchases, and keep customers connected to the brand at every step
Industry
Online Food Ordering โ
Country
United States of America
Project duration
5 Months
Zaxby's is an American fast-casual restaurant chain built around chicken โ wings, fingers, sandwiches, and the sauces that the brand's customers are genuinely loyal to. With hundreds of locations across the United States, Zaxby's has an established customer base that was already coming back regularly. The question the brand was asking by 2023 was whether a purpose-built mobile app could convert that habitual in-store loyalty into a digital ordering habit โ and whether a rewards mechanic could accelerate it.
The Flavour Bank was central to that thinking. The idea was direct: every dollar spent earns ten points, those points accumulate in the user's Flavour Bank, and the bank gets redeemed for rewards โ food items, exclusive offers, gifts that weren't just discounts on the next purchase but things users would look forward to earning.
Zaxby's needed a development partner who understood that a restaurant ordering app isn't a generic e-commerce product with a food category applied to it. The ordering logic, the location flow, the pickup-vs-delivery split, the loyalty point calculation, and the real-time order status all had product-specific requirements that a standard e-commerce framework doesn't cover cleanly.
The five-month delivery timeline was firm. The client had a launch target tied to a marketing campaign, and a slip in the app delivery would have had downstream consequences. They needed a team that could plan the scope precisely, build in parallel across iOS and Android, and deliver a product that was polished enough to represent the Zaxby's brand โ not a first draft that needed three more months of refinement.
We help fintech startups build secure, full-featured digital wallet platforms with iOS, Android, web interfaces, and admin panels โ including QR payments, merchant discovery, spending analytics, and role-based operations.
6 Months Free Maintenance After Launch
We mapped the entire ordering journey before any interface was designed, counting the taps from app open to order confirmed for both pickup and delivery scenarios. A target of five or fewer meaningful interactions was set as the design goal for a repeat user ordering a familiar item. Menu categories were structured around how customers actually browse Zaxby's food โ by item type rather than by internal product naming โ so users landed on the right section without hunting. The cart updated in real time as items were added, and the checkout screen showed the full summary with no hidden fields requiring expansion before the confirm button was reachable.
01
02
Pickup and delivery split into separate logical flows at the fulfillment selection screen, but the menu and cart were shared. A user who started building a pickup order and switched to delivery didn't lose their cart โ the items carried over and the additional delivery fields appeared. The pickup flow queried the selected location's estimated preparation time and displayed a realistic ready window rather than a fixed estimate. The delivery flow validated the entered address against the selected location's delivery radius before allowing the user to proceed .
03
Push notifications through Firebase were configured around three meaningful order milestones: order confirmed, order being prepared, and order ready for pickup or out for delivery. Nothing between. The rationale was that a notification at every micro-status change would train users to ignore the alerts, which would undermine the one notification they actually cared about โ the ready notification. The notification copy was written in Zaxby's brand voice rather than generic status language.
The backend infrastructure was configured with a load balancer distributing incoming API requests across multiple server instances. MongoDB handled the high-frequency order dataโwrites during peak hour from hundreds of simultaneous order placementsโwhile PostgreSQL managed the structured user account, loyalty programme, and location data. Node.js handled the WebSocket connections for real-time order status updates, maintaining persistent connections without the overhead of repeated HTTP polling.
04
Laravel API covering authentication (JWT), user accounts, menu management, location data and availability, order creation and lifecycle management, the Flavor Bank calculation engine, and rewards redemption logic. The MongoDB order data layer and the PostgreSQL user and loyalty data layer are both built and integrated. Node.js WebSocket server established for real-time order status. Firebase Cloud Messaging configured for the three-milestone notification system.
iOS and Android were built in parallel against the shared API contract. Both apps have a location finder with GPS integration, full menu browsing with item customization, a dual fulfillment flow (pickup and delivery branching from a shared cart), secure checkout, a real-time order status screen with a WebSocket connection, a Flavor Bank dashboard and redemption flow, push notification handling, and order history with reordering.
End-to-end functional QA across both platforms covering the complete order lifecycle for pickup and delivery, Flavourr Bank calculation accuracy across all edge cases, location accuracy testing across sampled real Zaxby's locations, and push notification delivery timing. Simulated peak-load test against the backend to verify load balancer behavior under concurrent order spikes. App Store and Google Play submission and approval. Launch in 2023.
5
The app went from kickoff to live on both the App Store and Google Play in five months, on schedule for the client's marketing launch.
10 pts
The Flavor Bank loyalty system launched fully live at release, calculating points accurately across discounts, refunds, and split payments.
2
Pickup and delivery both run from one shared cart, branching into their own logic only at fulfillment selection.
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