The pre-order that waits its turn
An order placed at midday for seven o’clock should not sit on the kitchen screen all afternoon. Ours waits off the pass and appears when there is time to cook it — on each kitchen’s own lead time, not a number we picked.
Collection times are the easiest feature to get half right. Taking the order is trivial. What breaks kitchens is what the screen does with it for the seven hours in between.
The wrong answer is to put it on the pass immediately. A ticket for seven o’clock sitting at the top of the board at midday is not information, it is furniture — and worse, it pushes the tickets that matter now further down. Do that a few times and a chef stops trusting the order of the board, which is the only thing the board is for.
Waiting is a state, not a filter
So a scheduled order is genuinely held. It is not on the board and quietly filtered out of view; it is in a different state, and it moves into the cooking queue when there is time to cook it. One sweep a minute does the moving, because a slot is fifteen minutes wide and being up to a minute late starting is fine while being fifteen is not.
Whose thirty minutes?
The interesting decision is how far ahead to start. A kitchen that says its food takes thirty minutes has told you something specific about itself, and a system that starts every kitchen’s pre-orders on the same schedule has quietly decided that setting was decorative.
Ours reads each venue’s own lead time. A kitchen that says sixty minutes sees a seven o’clock order at six; one that says fifteen sees it at quarter to. A venue that has never set one falls back to thirty, and that fallback is deliberate rather than accidental — a missing setting should behave sensibly, not divide by nothing.
The part we had never actually run
This is a single statement that runs every sixty seconds against the order table, and until this week nothing had ever executed it in a test. Plenty had checked that the clock reached it. Nothing had checked what it did when it got there.
That distinction is not pedantry. If that statement were subtly wrong — comparing the times the wrong way round, or reading one kitchen’s lead time for another’s — nothing would go red. No error, no alert. A pre-order simply would not appear, and the kitchen would find out at the same moment the customer did.
We wrote the test, ran the real statement against a real database, and it is correct: the right orders move, the ones still hours out stay put, a kitchen’s own lead time decides its own orders, and an order whose time has already passed still reaches the pass rather than being stranded by a minute the system missed.
What to ask your own supplier
Ask what happens to a pre-order between the moment it is taken and the moment it is cooked, and ask who decides when it appears. If the answer is that it goes straight on the screen, your board will be full of furniture on any day you take more than a couple. If the answer involves a fixed number of minutes, ask whose number it is.