The state before
CR Coffee is a New Orleans coffee company with four retail locations. Like most growing multi-location shops, it had hit the wall where the group text + a shared Google Drive + three different scheduling apps stops scaling. Schedules lived in one app, recipes lived in a folder, training lived in another folder, the manager's clipboards lived on a clipboard. Updating a recipe meant updating it in three places and hoping the right people noticed. New hires onboarded by being handed a stack of paper.
The breaking point was the moment between "we have one shop" and "we have four shops." That's the gap that destroys operations — the systems that worked for one fail silently at four, and by the time you notice, you've lost a week of consistency.
What we built
The Coffee Shop Portal is a multi-tenant Progressive Web App (PWA) — an installable web app that lives on any staff phone like a native app, with no App Store and no IT request — that unifies the eight or nine things a multi-location coffee operation needs to run. It's per-tenant isolated (each shop gets its own database, branding, and access controls), mobile-first (every interaction tested on a barista's phone, not a designer's laptop), and built so that the things that change most often (schedules, recipes, announcements) update once and propagate everywhere.
- Schedules with shift swap requests and time-off workflows
- Opening and closing checklists, customizable per location
- Recipes and training materials, version-controlled
- Team messaging with ack-required announcements ("did everyone read this?")
- Inventory with supplier-ready order sheets — par levels, restock triggers, vendor lookup
- Push notifications for shift changes, inventory alerts, and manager broadcasts
- Per-tenant isolation: each shop's data is fully separated; each shop gets its own branding
The state after
New hires onboard with a phone in their hand. A recipe change in the back office propagates to every barista on shift. The opening manager doesn't have to call the closing manager from yesterday to find out what got left undone. Inventory order sheets generate themselves from par-level thresholds — the manager reviews, edits, and sends. The four shops operate as one coordinated team instead of four parallel ones.
Most importantly, the operation runs on infrastructure that the operator controls. There's no SaaS bill that doubles. There's no feature roadmap held hostage by a vendor's quarterly priorities. When something needs to change at CR Coffee, it changes that night.
