cultureblog

In late November, one of our longstanding clients, Harvest Farms, approached us with a  challenging proposition. By January 15, 2010, could we create a custom-designed database application on their existing website that would allow their customers to “build a box” of food products and tally each nutritional value? Needless to say, Durrani happily rose to the challenge.

Harvest Farms supplies a variety of food products on a weekly basis to numerous institutions throughout the country. The food products offered include boxed meals—customized based on dietary and budget requirements, sandwiches, sliced lunchmeats and cheeses. But instead of ordering these boxes via the standard phone call or e-mail, Harvest Farms wanted to make building a box fun and interactive for their customers.

After compiling the nutritional values and photographing over 70 products that would go into the boxed meals, we swiftly moved into development. The database, built from scratch in PHP and MYSQL, allows the user to select one product from each food category, creating the meal of their choice. All the while, the total calories, fat grams, carbohydrates, etc. of each item are being added together. The user can view the total nutritional summary along the way and then submit their boxed meal to a Harvest Farms account rep.

Now Harvest Farms’ customers are able to build their food boxes and obtain the nutritional value for not only an individual product—but the entire box—within moments. Check out the new “Build-A-Box” application at Harvest Farms.