Meals
The kitchen already knows who's eating what.
Parents order from the menu you actually published, on a phone, in a couple of taps. What comes out the other end is a kitchen list in your school's own sections — exact counts per dish, each child under the name they go by, every allergen checked against that child's own record — and it prints and exports as the same sheet you're looking at. Nobody retypes anything, and nobody counts twice.
The menu runs as far as you've published
Parents can order right up to the last date you've put a meal on, up to about a term ahead — not three weeks out with nothing explaining why. Meal photos you've already uploaded appear next to each option automatically, and ingredients sit behind a link so a five-meal day isn't a wall of text on a phone. Allergens stay on the meal itself, highlighted, without opening anything.
Choices can change until the deadline
A parent can open a confirmed meal and edit their choices — leaving out an ingredient, say — right up to the ordering deadline. Where a discount applies, the menu shows the original price struck through with the discounted one beside it, per child, rather than springing it at checkout.
The kitchen list is your kitchen's shape
Split it into the sections you actually use — Lower School, Kindergarten, Staff, Guests, whatever suits — each with its own colour, children grouped by class within it. Dietary needs and notes get their own columns, and you can pin a note to any eater or section for the day. Class teachers sit with their class rather than in a separate staff block, so the counts match the table the food goes to.
Allergens are cross-checked, not just displayed
Meals carry the fourteen statutory allergens as tick-boxes. The kitchen list checks them against each child's own record and flags a clash in red, a preference in amber, and anyone whose needs aren't confirmed yet. A severe allergy is spelled out in words on the sheet.
Print and Excel are the same sheet
The print-out and the Excel export mirror what's on screen — colours, sections, classes, allergens and notes — so the sheet handed to the kitchen is the one you were looking at. Lists run from the start of the current academic year; earlier weeks aren't shown, because class structures change year to year.
The counts are paid orders only
The kitchen list has always counted paid orders, and now the dining calendar agrees with it: an abandoned checkout no longer inflates a day's numbers or shows up in a parent's reminder emails. Adding a meal for a child already on the sheet is blocked with a clear message instead of quietly making a duplicate.
12:00 pm · In the kitchen
Your sections, your class names, your counts.
Children flow into the right section automatically and group by class within it. If your school knows a class by its teacher rather than a letter, label it that way — "3 JMK" — and it reads that way everywhere, the kitchen list most of all.
Kitchen list · Tuesday
2 severe · 4 allergiesLower School
- Roast chicken · 3 JMK 84
- Veggie lasagne · 3 JMK 41
Staff & guests
- Jacket potato 17
Prints and exports exactly as shown
The same lunch, from three sides
The parent sees
The week's meals per child, your message to parents at the top of the page, a reminder before the deadline and a Sunday email covering the week ahead — lunches and clubs together, children named by first name only.
The office sees
A dining calendar that agrees with the kitchen, ad-hoc meals that can be added for invited staff or marked free, and a clear message rather than a cryptic error when a child's family has nobody to bill.
The kitchen sees
Exact counts per dish, in your own sections, with each child under the name they actually go by — a preferred name carries through to lists, registers, emails and exports, while the legal name stays on the record.
See a school day with Rafyo
A 20-minute walkthrough with a real menu, a real register and no slide deck.