How The Crown at Home Saved 12+ Hours Per Week With a Proper Ordering System

The Crown at Mickleton is a restaurant in County Durham, about five miles from Barnard Castle. When COVID lockdown hit and the restaurant had to close, owner Andrew made a decision: pivot to meal delivery or shut down completely.

The Crown at Home was born – the same quality meals The Crown was known for, but in pre-prepared, easy-to-cook boxes that customers could collect or have delivered.

But running a delivery operation with no proper system nearly broke the business before it started.

Andrew was trying to run a meal delivery business with tools designed for surveys, not commerce:

• The Google Form nightmare

  Orders were taken through a 16-page Google Form that listed every meal available. But here’s the problem: customers had to deselect everything they didn’t want, then select what they did want. It was backwards, confusing, and caused constant errors.

• Manual payment processing

  After orders came through the form, Andrew had to ring each customer individually to take payment over the phone. For 40 orders per week, that’s hours of phone calls.

• Spreadsheet hell

  Once orders and payments were done, Andrew spent hours copying data into spreadsheets to figure out:

  • What ingredients to order
  • How much to cook of each dish
  • Which orders were going where
  • Delivery routes for drivers

All told, he was spending a day and a half every week on admin work for what should have been a simple ordering process. During a pandemic, when every hour mattered, that was unsustainable.

We built a proper food ordering system that handled everything the Google Form couldn’t – and automated the admin work that was drowning Andrew in spreadsheets.

• WordPress + WooCommerce + custom functionality

  To keep costs down (critical during lockdown), we used WooCommerce with a restaurant plugin from Barn2Plugins as the foundation, then added custom code to handle The Crown’s specific workflow.

• Online ordering with instant payment

  Customers could browse the menu, add meals to their basket, and pay instantly online. No phone calls. No manual payment processing. Orders came in automatically, payment confirmed, job done.

• Allergy warnings

  We added custom functionality to flag allergens in meals during checkout, so customers knew exactly what was in their food before ordering.

• Custom admin dashboard

  This is where the real time savings came from. On Thursdays, after orders closed for the week, Andrew could click a button and get:

  • Printable order sheets (PDF) – Kitchen staff could print off all the orders and check them against what they were packing. No more cross-referencing spreadsheets.
  • Delivery route data (CSV) – Export all delivery addresses and order details in a format that made route planning simple.
  • Stock management – Automated inventory tracking so they knew exactly what ingredients they needed, with no manual counting.

The new system saved The Crown at Home over 12 hours per week:

• No more phone payment processing – customers paid online, instantly
• No more spreadsheet copying – all order data exported automatically
• Kitchen staff could work from printed sheets – everything they needed on one page per order
• Delivery planning simplified – CSV export made route planning straightforward

The Crown at Home ran successfully through COVID lockdown. When restrictions lifted and the restaurant reopened, Andrew kept the system – it now runs once a year for Christmas meal boxes.