Social Supermarket Inventory and Checkout App

Te Kotahi o Te Tauihu Charitable Trust was set up in February 2021 by the eight iwi of Te Tauihu o Te Waka-a-Māui (top of the South Island) to advance health and wellbeing, alleviate poverty, ensure adequate food is available and promote education and skills within the communities of Te Tauihu (the top of the South Island) and in particular our Māori communities. One of their recent initiatives is Te Pātaka – a social supermarket led by Weenie Takao with a physical space where whānau and organisations can arrange for the supply of a range of fresh and frozen kai to be supplied to help households and invividuals alike.

Te Kotahi needed software that combined multiple functions: - Management of a large inventory across key suppliers - A checkout-like experience (notable, for the ‘sale’ of goods (on a points basis, not monetary basis) - The ability to plan, book and schedule in person pickups and deliveries to regional areas - To be able to manage individual needs and track their engagement and points balances through their engagements with Te Pataka - To create reports and dashboards that allow seamless reporting to stakeholders on Te Pataka’s community contributions and supply chain.

Because of the unique mix of requirements, a Standard POS system, nor a Standard inventory system would meet their needs – especially not when considering purchasing with points instead of currency. Adding in the other requirements, and Te Kotahi were looking at having to blend together different software to meet different needs. Enter Zoho Creator and DDL. DDL were able to understand the objectives for Te Pātaka, and create a unique application on Zoho Creator that met all of their needs for inventory, checkout and reporting, whilst utilising existing, integrated Zoho One apps such as Bookings, Forms and CRM for collection requests, and custom data such as points balances, which seamlessly flow between systems. DDL extended the solution at no cost to support a great idea to also generate recipe cards and ideas for whānau. The Te Pātaka team can now click to generate a range of recipe ideas right frm the checkout screen, and create and send a PDF to the customer, providing healthy, practical kai options to get them started. The processes utilises OpenAI’s API to assess the ingredients purchased, and also incorporates any notes or preferences such as dietary requirements that have been noted on the order to generate appropriate recipes for the whānau size. DDL donated a laptop, scanner and monitor to complete Te Pātaka’s checkout technology solution.

Te Pātaka is now accessible to four key regions in Te Tauihu – Motueka, Wairau, Whākatu and Mohua – distributed teams and whānau can make use of the service through it’s online booking process from any device. Weenie is able to manage inventory from the moment it’s allocated to an order, can track demand, Schedule pickups/deliveries and monitor kai consumption and usage through integrated dashboards and reports within the Te Pātaka app, making upstream reporting straightforward. All of this was achieved using a single integrated application – Zoho Creator, as part of the incredible Zoho One bundle – to support the inspiring vision to Te Pātaka to provide for it’s communities.