BigBite: Building a Restaurant Food Ordering App

The brief: a restaurant's own ordering app

BigBite was built for a burger restaurant under NDA. Like many restaurants, it relied on third-party delivery platforms that take a commission on every order and own the relationship with the customer. The restaurant wanted its own app: its brand, its menu, its customers, and direct orders for pickup and delivery.

Burgers are rarely ordered exactly as listed, so the app had to handle customisation properly, make regular orders quick to repeat, and keep customers informed while they wait.

What the app does

• A menu organised into burgers, sliders and sides.
• A rich detail screen for every item.
• Customisation of spice level and portion size before adding to the cart.
• Ratings and favourites for quick reordering.
• In-app payment.
• Live order status from the kitchen to pickup or delivery.

Modelling a customisable menu

Customisation is where food ordering apps most often go wrong: the customer chooses extra spicy and a large portion, and the kitchen receives a plain regular burger. BigBite models every menu item with modifier groups - spice level, portion size - each with its own options and any price difference.

When an order is placed, the app saves a snapshot of exactly what was chosen, including each option and its price at that moment. If the menu changes later, orders already placed are unaffected, and the kitchen always sees the order as the customer built it.

Order totals are calculated on the server from the menu, not taken from the phone, so the price charged is always the price on the menu.

Live order status with Firebase

Not knowing where an order is leads to phone calls and frustration. BigBite uses Firebase's real-time database listeners, so when staff move an order from received to preparing to ready, the customer's screen updates instantly without refreshing. Key steps are also sent as push notifications for customers who have closed the app.

Security rules make sure customers can read only their own orders, and only staff can change an order's status.

Making reorders take seconds

Regular customers tend to order the same things. Hunting through the menu every time is friction that sends them back to a delivery platform. Favourites and ratings let them find and repeat a usual order in a couple of taps, which is the habit that makes a restaurant's own app worth having.

Design decisions

• Clear menu sections - burgers, sliders, sides - instead of one long scroll.
• Customisation happens on the item's detail screen, before it goes into the cart, so the cart is always accurate.
• Order status is shown as a simple progress tracker that answers "where is my food?" at a glance.

More on designing flows like these in mobile app UI/UX design.

Stack and approach

The app is built in React Native with TypeScript and NativeWind on Firebase for authentication, data, server-side functions and push notifications. Firebase's real-time listeners suit order tracking particularly well, and its managed infrastructure means a restaurant does not need its own server team.

What we would do differently

We would design the staff side as a tablet-first screen from the start and add estimated ready times to each order. Both reduce the number of times a customer has to wonder whether their order has been forgotten.

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