LEMONCAT is digitizing the catering industry with a SaaS platform and consumer marketplace. NFQ's software engineers have created and developed the technological base and infrastructure for this startup. Our solutions have helped the company secure millions-worth of investments and launched in 400+ cities while connecting more than 500 catering suppliers within 2 years. 

Our team created the software platform for LEMONCAT and configured its technological infrastructure from the first line of code. The custom software solutions enable process management for B2B catering services and connect suppliers with companies that occasionally or regularly need catering services for events or other occasions. All the end-customer has to do is specify the city, date, type of event, and budget and choose the most suitable offer on the online platform.

Business solution:

The company has service providers on one side of the platform and customers who need catering on the other side. But the traditional online shopping model is not suitable for the latter, as customer needs often change from the initial order. That is why we created a communication-based platform. Suppliers can submit offers based on a customer's initial order, and then the customer selects the ones they like the most and communicates directly with the suppliers until they work out the most suitable option.

Technological solution:

While developing the LEMONCAT platform, NFQ worked on the company’s technological infrastructure, servers, and synchronization with Salesforce CRM using Heroku Connect and provided the client with added-value business solutions via cloud computing platforms and APIs. Amazon Web Services are used for multiple projects within the LEMONCAT platform. One service implemented by NFQ was a smooth migration to AWS from the previously used cloud application platform Heroku. 

The tech stack used for the development of the platform includes React JS, PHP on Symfony framework, and Elasticsearch, all run via AWS. Currently, the technological solution created for LEMONCAT has end-users in both Europe and Australia.

Amazon Web Services provided:

For LEMONCAT, we have integrated mixed AWS Managed Services according to AWS best practices. This allows splitting control over processes between the internal business managers and the AWS system in order to transfer some of the procedures to the AWS and move faster, optimize expenses, reduce IT costs, and scale within the LEMONCAT application. 

The LEMONCAT platform uses AWS cost optimization tool  Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances, which delivers a significant discount (up to 72%) compared to On-Demand pricing and provides capacity reservation when used in a specific Availability Zone.

Also, LEMONCAT has integrated services like Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) for large-scale object storage and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for easy setup, operation, and scaling of a relational database in the cloud. These tools give LEMONCAT agility, cost efficiency, connectivity, flexibility to expand in line with the volatile business needs.

Using AWS, LEMONCAT was able to continue developing its unique market offering. Later on, the company joined the Caterwings company owned by the B2B Food Group in 2019. AWS services created the conditions for successful and smooth integration of their systems in a relatively short time.

Overall, for LEMONCAT, the NFQ team has integrated these AWS tools:

  • Amazon EC2 – a virtual server in Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud for running applications on the Amazon Web Services infrastructure.
  • Amazon S3 – or Amazon Simple Storage Service, a service to provide object storage through a web service interface. 
  • Amazon CloudFront – a fast content delivery network (CDN) service that securely delivers data, videos, applications, and APIs to customers globally with low latency and high transfer speeds, all within a developer-friendly environment.
  • Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) – a distributed relational database service to simplify the setup, operation, and scaling of a relational database for use in applications. It provides a selection of instance types optimized to fit different relational database use cases and flexibly adjust to changing flows of data volume.
  • Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) – this service automatically distributes incoming traffic across multiple targets in multiple Availability Zones and ensures only healthy targets receive traffic. 
  • Identity and Access Management (IAM) – a feature that enables you to manage access to AWS services and resources securely. 
  • Amazon Route 53 – a highly available and scalable cloud Domain Name System (DNS) web service used to give developers and businesses an extremely reliable and cost-effective way to route end-users to Internet applications by translating names into the numeric IP addresses.
  • Amazon Elasticsearch Service – a fully managed service that makes it easy to deploy, secure, and run Elasticsearch cost-effectively at scale. 
  • Amazon ElastiCache – a fully managed in-memory data store and cache service which improves the performance of web applications by retrieving information from managed in-memory caches, instead of relying entirely on slower disk-based databases.

Currently, you can access the Lemoncat platform operating under the Caterwings brand here.

Services provided