As the saying goes, every business is a software business nowadays. This includes Huuva. Our mission is to power virtual restaurants through our platform, meaning we are very much intertwined in both the software business as well as the restaurant business. Because of this, Huuva OS — our kitchen software — was launched at the same time as our first commercial kitchen was opened at the heart of Tapiola, Finland. In this blog, I’ll open the lid on what we are building at Huuva and why software is needed to make great meals. 

Bye-bye paper, welcome OS

Traditionally kitchens use paper tickets to handle customer orders. You’ve probably seen those paper ticket holders in restaurants – they are used to hold those flappy papers, brought in by waiters after taking orders from customers. The paper tickets work well in a regular dine-in restaurant. However, it’s a different situation when you work in a kitchen where dine-in is not an option and all orders are hosted by the delivery partners’ software. 

All Huuva orders come in digitally. Compared to a regular restaurant order, many of our orders include dishes from multiple brands – one order can include both a salad from Pupu and a few different burgers from Bites Burgers. To make life easy in the kitchen, our software carefully breaks down the order and only delivers relevant information to each cook. The pizza guy knows you don’t like pineapple while the cook from Pupu knows exactly how much vinaigrette to put on your salad. Huuva’s software provides customized views for everyone in the kitchen, creating smooth processes and fluid work flows.  

No pizza left behind 

Every time an order is made, we need to give the customer an accurate ETA of how long it will take until the delivery reaches their doorstep. Timing is a tricky matter in restaurants. Different products take different times to prepare – a salad might be ready in five while cooking the burger takes a few more minutes. A cook can easily build a few burgers at a time, while cooking several pizzas at the same time depends on the size of the oven. To simplify the process for our cooks, our software provides visibility and time estimates on other items of the multi-brand order they’re working on. These sorts of calculations are easy for software but hard for humans in the heat of the moment.

It’s also important for us to be able to integrate Huuva OS with the delivery partners’ software so that we play our part in creating a smooth experience for the food lovers out there. We want customers to have full visibility on their order, as nothing feels as long as the time you wait for your pizza to arrive. 

What lies ahead

Our first version of Huuva OS is now up and running, but we have a lot more work to do. While we grow and open new locations around Europe, we need to optimize the kitchen information flow further. We want to hone the software to be even better at timing orders from different restaurant brands. We also have interesting integrations to make between our system and our delivery partners. As we scale, we need our software to scale with us so that we can support more and more kitchens in sending out top-notch delivery food efficiently. This means our future will hold plenty of scrummy challenges both on the architecture and also on the data analysis side of things.

So to summarize Huuva’s technical future: a lot of unknowns, a lot of investigation to happen and a ton of ambition to build the best software out there. If you want to take part in this journey and work with – let’s be honest – the most ambitious team out here, let us know! Our engineering team is hiring, so check our open positions here.