Chef Michele Laiso — Private Chef Platform

Project overview

A private chef platform running two businesses at once: weekly meal prep delivered across Sydney, and in-home private dining. Clients configure a plan — household size, meals, dietary exclusions — and get live pricing; the admin behind it runs production, turning structured recipes into scaled shopping lists, PDF exports, QR meal labels with use-by dates, and invoices.

The challenge

Michele Laiso runs two businesses under one name: chef-prepared weekly meals delivered across Sydney, and a chef cooking in the client's own kitchen. Both are priced on variables — household size, days per week, meals per day, dietary exclusions, add-ons — so no brochure site could quote either of them, and every enquiry started as a manual back-and-forth. Behind the counter, the harder problem: the kitchen side of the business (what to buy, what to cook, what goes on each container leaving the kitchen) was running on spreadsheets that could not scale with the client list.

What we did

• 1Interactive plan configurator with live pricing for both service lines — household tier, days, meals per day, dietary exclusions and intent, with chef fees, food cost and add-ons calculated as the client builds the plan, plus shareable prefill links the chef can send straight into a conversation
• 2Client accounts and portal — register, sign in, manage a profile, keep plan selections between visits and switch between the delivery and private-chef contexts without losing the configuration
• 3Admin as an operations tool, not a CMS: meals hold structured ingredients (quantity, unit, category) alongside macros, allergens and instructions, so one recipe drives the menu page, the shopping list and the label
• 4Production workflow — shopping lists scaled to the week's orders and grouped by category and supplier, PDF export and email, safety-stock buffers, leftover tracking carried into the following week, and per-client ingredient and macro overrides
• 5QR meal labels printed to two Avery sheet formats, each label carrying the exact use-by date and a code that opens a public meal page with macros, ingredients by category, allergen notice and reheating instructions
• 6SEO and content layer built in: per-page metadata, Open Graph and JSON-LD, a sitemap covering 40 URLs including every service tier, a dedicated private chef cost page answering the question people actually search, an llms.txt for AI citation, and a journal with its own admin

The results

Services delivered

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Summary

The interesting part of this project was never the website. A premium food service lives or dies on the operation behind it — the shopping list that has to be right on Sunday, the label that has to carry the right use-by date on Wednesday — and building the client-facing site on top of that operation, rather than beside it, means one recipe edit updates the menu, the costing, the shopping list and the label at once. Publishing real prices was the other deliberate choice: it filters enquiries before they reach the chef, which is worth more than the enquiries it loses.