A food ordering app designed entirely around independent restaurants — giving local venues back their margin while giving customers a better experience than the platforms that take 30%.
The problem with Deliveroo, Uber Eats, and Just Eat is well-documented: the commission rates — which regularly sit at 25–35% per order — have been quietly destroying the economics of independent restaurants for years. Plateful's founders had a different model: a flat-fee subscription for restaurants, zero per-order commission, and a customer-facing app that put the human story of the restaurant front and centre rather than treating food as commodity delivery.
They needed a prototype that demonstrated both sides of the platform — the customer ordering experience and the restaurant management side — credibly enough to take to restaurants for early partnership conversations and to investors for seed funding. Four weeks to make it real.
Before any design work, we needed to understand exactly where the big platforms fall short — not just on commission, but on the customer experience itself. We ran a detailed audit of Deliveroo, Uber Eats, and Just Eat: mapping every step of the ordering journey, identifying the dark patterns (the upsell screens, the hidden service charges, the loyalty programmes that lock customers to the platform rather than the restaurant), and cataloguing where independent restaurant listings get buried under promoted chains.
We also interviewed eight independent restaurant owners — a mix of London-based sit-down restaurants, dark kitchens, and multi-site independents — about their experience running on the big platforms. The finding that shaped the most design decisions: none of them knew who their customers were. All of that data sat with Deliveroo. A customer could have ordered from the same restaurant 50 times and the restaurant had no way to recognise them, reach them, or build any kind of relationship. Plateful's model would change that: restaurants would have access to their full customer list from day one.
The customer survey (72 respondents, recruited via social channels) confirmed appetite for the concept: 81% said they'd use a commission-free alternative if the selection and UX were comparable. The UX was our job.
The customer-side app was built around three principles drawn from the research. First: discovery that feels like browsing, not searching. Rather than a search-first interface (which advantages brands people already know), we led with an editorial-style feed — new restaurants, restaurants near you, restaurants with a story. Independent food is interesting; the interface needed to treat it that way.
Second: transparency at every step. Total cost — including the flat £1.49 customer fee that replaces the hidden service charges common on other platforms — is shown from the menu screen, not revealed at checkout. This was a deliberate contrast to the experience all our research participants described as the biggest frustration on existing platforms.
Third: restaurant identity first. Each restaurant page opens with a full-screen header image, a short story from the owners, and the founding year. Orders arrive with a message from the kitchen. None of this is revolutionary, but none of it exists on the platforms — and it changes how the customer thinks about where their money is going.
The restaurant side was a secondary deliverable but no less important — the platform only works if getting onto it feels easy enough that independents will do it without dedicated tech support. We designed a guided onboarding flow that a restaurant owner could complete on a phone in under 20 minutes: basic info, photos, menu upload (with a CSV import path for restaurants with existing digital menus), payment details, and go live.
The dashboard was deliberately minimal: today's orders in a single scrolling list with a status toggle (received / preparing / ready / collected); a menu editor with a quick-hide toggle for dishes that are sold out; and an earnings view showing weekly and monthly income with a clear breakdown of the flat subscription cost versus the per-order commission they were no longer paying. That last screen was designed to be a retention tool as much as a reporting tool — we wanted restaurant owners to see in real terms what the zero-commission model was worth to them every month.
The 44-screen prototype was used in six restaurant partner conversations and two investor meetings. Four of the six restaurants expressed immediate interest in being early launch partners. The investor feedback cited the restaurant dashboard — specifically the "commission saved" earnings view — as the most compelling element in the deck.
Plateful's model isn't just a better deal for restaurants. It's a better experience for customers who've grown tired of choosing between chain delivery and a clunky ordering website. The design made that argument visually and practically — and the prototype proved it was buildable.
"We walked into those investor meetings with something that looked and felt like a real product. The restaurants we showed it to got it immediately — and that's because the design actually explained our model better than we could have done in words." Co-founder, Plateful
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