A hybrid, hands-on experience demonstrating impact across Supply Chain, Digital Operations, and Marketing

Business Insights

In 2023, I co-founded the HAHA Meal business with a simple idea: make weekly meal prep easier for busy families and young working professionals.

In talking with local families and young professionals, I noticed a consistent pain point: they wanted fresh, home-style meals but didn’t have the time or predictable schedules to cook during the workweek.

Pain Points

  • Wanted fresh, flexible meals instead of frozen meal kits

  • Had limited time or energy to cook on weekdays

  • Found restaurant dining or delivery too time-consuming and costly

Business Background

HAHA Meal is a weekly meal-prep service created for families and young professionals who want fresh, home-style meals during the workweek, especially on days when cooking just isn’t realistic after a long day. Customers order through our Shopify-based platform using a weekly pre-order system, which lets us run an order-to-make, just-in-time (JIT) model so everything stays fresh and we avoid unnecessary waste.

All meals are prepared from scratch and delivered 2–3 times a week, focusing on weekday convenience rather than replacing restaurants. Because we work with perishable ingredients and frequent delivery cycles, the business relies heavily on accurate forecasting, smooth production planning, and dependable last-mile logistics. In many ways, HAHA Meal combines the challenges of supply chain, digital operations, and customer engagement into one experience.

Showcase of HAHA Meal Family Combo—Freshly made with two choices of proteins plus two selections of veggies.

Role & Responsibilities

Supply Chain & Operations

  • Demand forecasting

  • Procurement & inventory

  • Production workflow design

  • Food safety & quality control

  • Last-mile delivery routing

Digital & Growth

  • Built Shopify ordering platform

  • Managed web content & UX flows

  • Designed multi-channel marketing

  • Created visuals, campaigns, social content

  • Customer engagement & retention strategies

Key Challenges & How I Solved Them

Throughout the growth of HAHA Meal, several operational and digital challenges emerged that required a structured, scalable approach:

Challenge 1: Highly Variable Weekly Demand

Menu choices were broad, and customers selected different meals each week or even each day. Order volume fluctuated dramatically with menu changes, seasons, and individual household preferences. This level of variability made it difficult to plan inventory, production, and labor efficiently.

Challenge 2: Perishable Ingredients and Waste Risk

Because everything was freshly prepared, over-purchasing led to waste while under-purchasing risked shortages and inconsistent quality. Managing perishables required precise planning and tight coordination.

Challenge 3: Scaling Production With Limited Labor

As the business grew from a few dozen orders to over 1,000 meals a week, manual processes created bottlenecks and increased operational complexity. Maintaining consistency and speed with a small team became challenging.

Challenge 4: Low Digital Conversion at the Start

Early customers browsed our Shopify website but didn’t always complete orders. This pointed to friction in the digital user experience and limited early brand awareness.

Solution

To address these challenges, our team developed a set of interconnected operational and digital systems that supported sustainable and efficient growth across the business:

  • Built a 34-sheet forecasting model linking Shopify orders to dish-level BOMs and ingredient inventory, giving the team clearer visibility into demand patterns and improving weekly planning accuracy.

  • Adopted a Just-In-Time procurement approach, introduced safety stock rules, and standardized portion sizes to reduce waste, maintain freshness, and improve overall cost control.

  • Streamlined operations into a structured three-day production cycle, supported by documented SOPs and station-based workflows, which increased consistency and enabled the team to scale output without additional labor.

  • Enhanced digital performance by optimizing the Shopify user experience, improving menu layouts and checkout flow, and running weekly social content and promotional campaigns that strengthened conversions and repeat orders.

Supply Chain System Flow

A clean, logic-driven overview

    • Pre-orders

    • Forecast tiers

    • Dish-level predictions

    • Ingredient-level BOM

    • JIT purchasing

    • Waste log

    • Real-time inventory tracker

    • Prep → Cook → Package

    • Labor allocation

    • Quality checkpoints

    • Route grouping

    • Delivery windows

    • Capacity planning

Digital & Marketing Engine

A separate, dedicated section to keep marketing pathways open.

Website & UX

  • Shopify customization

  • Order flow optimization

  • Menu content design

  • Mobile-friendly user experience

Social Media & Content

  • Weekly content creation

  • Food photography & brand visuals

  • Customer engagement

Growth & Retention

  • Referral program

  • Promotions & campaigns

  • Repeat-customer strategy

  • Customer segmentation insights

Purpose: Demonstrates marketing skills without distracting from SCM narrative.

Results & Impact

  • 1,000+ weekly meals

  • 120+ families served

  • Expanded to 5 service areas

  • Positive cash flow in 3 months

  • Reduced waste via Demand Planning & JIT

  • Improved production efficiency

  • On-time delivery

Supply Chain Impact

  • Increased order conversion

  • Grew subscriber list

  • Increased weekly returning customers

  • Improved average order value

  • Enhanced brand presence with ellite partners

Digital & Marketing Impact

Tools & Skills Applied

Tools

Involved Skills

  • Forecasting

  • Lean operations

  • UX & content design

  • Customer insights

  • Marketing strategy

  • Process optimization

  • Data-driven decision-making

  • Cross-functional leadership

Takeaways & What This Taught Me About SCM & Digital

A short reflection that ties everything together:

  • Operations need data and a logic structure

  • Forecasting is critical for JIT perishable supply chains

  • Digital experience impacts order volume

  • Marketing and operations must work together

  • Process standardization enables scaling

  • Customer feedback drives menu planning and operations

    HAHA Meal gave me hands-on experience operating at the intersection of supply chain, digital operations, and customer engagement. It strengthened my interest in roles across the supply chain, e-commerce operations, digital strategy, and marketing, where data, process design, and customer experience come together.