Beach Brew Coffee
Operations Platform
Beach Brew is a seasonal coffee company located on the beaches of South Jersey. Currently we serve coffee on the North Wildwood, Wildwood, Wildwood Crest, and Sea Isle City beaches. We also operate 3 cafes throughout the Wildwoods. I lead technical operations for our entire business, as well as all operations for our beach business. On the beach, we have between 15–20 coffee carts each day, each manned by an individual barista.
This business model — scaled mobile vending of a single product — creates some really interesting logistics that can be tracked and optimized. Working hands on with all systems of the business, I've been building an all-encompassing operations platform to improve our sales and data tracking methods.
For the tech stack, I decided to keep it simple and modern with well-maintained libraries and frameworks for some of the heavy lifting.
We have 2 main systems — the online platform, which is fully functional but constantly being improved, and the mobile app, which is in development.
The Online Platform
The online platform acts as an admin backend to automate and assist with a lot of managerial tasks — scheduling, assigning zones to employees, a cash tracking system for our bookkeeper, stats pages, and other analytical calendar views. It's a simple system but provides a lot of valuable insights. The scheduling page alone reduced scheduling time from 2–3 hours a week to about 30 minutes.
The Mobile AppIn Development
The mobile app is an internal employee-facing application to allow for better tracking of employees and management of supplies. It digitizes previously physical systems. It also gives our restockers and managers a way to see all baristas on a live map, which is really valuable for coordinating across miles of beach.