Shared Stove - Shared Commercial Kitchen Booking and Operations Console
Booking and Operations Console for an Austin Commissary Kitchen
Designed and built a clickable booking and operations console for a shared commercial kitchen in Austin, Texas: a live day board per site, bookings priced by plan hours, peak windows and premium stations, cleaning checklists with photo evidence, and member documents that block new bookings when they expire.
Most of our work is under NDA. Per agreement, we can share the work but not the company details - all names and identifying information shown here have been changed.
Impact
Dashboard, the Today day board, bookings list, booking detail and compliance, plus a New booking panel with a live rules check. Every one of the 37 demo bookings opens its own detail page.
Peak hours on weekends 06:00-14:00 and weekdays 15:00-21:00, premium stations counted at 1.5 hours per hour, and $15 per 15 minutes of late checkout after a 5 minute grace, all itemised on the booking.
Certificates, permits and insurance carry expiry dates. An expired blocking document pauses new bookings, and only a 1 to 7 day override with a logged reason lifts it.
18 member businesses across 3 sites, 21 stations, 6 add-on equipment items, 22 member documents and 6 staff users.
The Problem
Caliche Row ran bookings from a shared Google Calendar, took applications by email and kept certificates and insurance papers in a filing cabinet. Two bakers regularly turned up for the same deck oven at 5am, a caterer's lapsed liability insurance went unnoticed for three months, cleaning disputes had no evidence either way, and overage hours were billed from memory and regularly disputed.
Our Solution
Shared Stove gives Caliche Row's managers one console across 3 sites: a live day board per site, bookings that price themselves from plan hours, peak windows and premium stations, cleaning checklists with time-stamped photos ready for audit, and a compliance queue that blocks bookings the moment a required document expires.
The Challenge: Renting a Kitchen by the Hour
Caliche Row does not cook or sell food. It rents stations, hours, equipment and storage to about 180 bakers, caterers, meal-prep companies, food trucks and sauce makers, and has to keep every site clean, safe and inspection-ready while they work.
Many Makers, One Oven
Forty stations are shared across 3 sites, each booking needs a 30 minute cleaning buffer after it, and bookings run 2 to 12 hours. A shared calendar could not stop double bookings or show a manager who was actually in the kitchen.
Papers That Expire
Texas generally requires food handler training for food employees and a certified food manager for food establishments, and Caliche Row requires $1,000,000 general liability cover naming it as additional insured. Each document has its own expiry date and holder.
Cleaning Disputes Without Evidence
"It was dirty when I arrived" had no answer. Deposit deductions for missed cleaning turned into arguments because nobody could show what the station looked like at checkout.
Charges Members Could Not Check
Included plan hours, overage rates, peak premiums, premium stations, add-on equipment, late checkout and cancellation fees all stack on one booking. Billed by hand at month end, the totals were hard to explain.
Our Approach: From Kitchen Rules to a Clickable Console
Spec and Rules Research
Mapped 9 user roles, 48 screens across the staff console, a door kiosk, the member app and public pages, and the data model for sites, stations, plans, members, documents, bookings, cleaning audits, storage, faults and temperature logs. Wrote down the rules the design follows: the Texas Food Establishment Rules, the FDA Food Code cold-holding limit, Texas food handler and food manager requirements, cottage food law and the Texas Data Privacy and Security Act, kept apart from Caliche Row's own policies.
Clickable Demo on a Production UI Kit
Built 5 key console screens on a production dashboard kit: the dashboard with utilisation heatmap and revenue mix, the Today board with a timeline per station and manual check-in, no-show and move actions, the bookings list with a cancellation fee preview, booking detail with the cleaning checklist, audit and itemised charges, and the compliance queue with document review, reminders and overrides. A site switcher filters every page.
What a Production Build Adds
Stripe for card and ACH payments, subscriptions and deposits, QuickBooks Online export, e-signature of the membership agreement, wireless fridge and freezer sensors, optional door access on check-in, Postmark and Twilio messaging, an iCalendar feed and S3 photo storage. Staff auth by role, an audit log of overrides, waivers and deductions, and the remaining screens: the member app, door kiosk, temperature logs, maintenance and inspection readiness.
Why It Works: Rules Checked Before the Booking
Every Booking Passes a Rules Check
Before a booking is saved, the panel checks its length against 2 to 12 hours, that the station is in service, that the member is not blocked, that a certified food manager covers it and that the cleaning buffer holds, then shows the charge estimate.
The Day on One Board
The Today board shows each station as a row with status-coloured blocks and a red line for now, with out-of-service equipment hatched and its work order shown. The side rail lists who is checked in, who arrives next, who is late out and which food trucks are due.
Charges Explained Line by Line
A booking shows hours from the included allowance, overage hours at the plan rate, peak premium, add-on equipment, late checkout and cancellation fees, so a member can see where the total came from. Waiving a fee needs a reason.
Evidence Before Any Deduction
Members tick each checklist item at checkout and photograph the ones that need it, with the time recorded. Managers audit item by item against those photos, so a cleaning dispute starts from the record rather than memory.
Related case studies
View all: Food & restaurants
Chhnang - QR Ordering and Pay-at-Table Platform in Khmer, English and Chinese
Designed and built a clickable QR ordering and service console for a four-venue restaurant group in Phnom Penh: guests order in rounds from a shared table cart and pay by KHQR or card, every price shows in USD and riel, tickets route to the right kitchen station, and managers run the floor and the 86 board from one place.
Kanoun - Kitchen Display System That Times and Checks Every Order
Designed and built a clickable kitchen display system for a 26-restaurant burger and fried chicken chain in Algeria: every order from the till, kiosks, drive-thru and delivery apps is split into station tickets, timed so the whole order finishes together, paced to the rider and checked at expo before it leaves, with allergy notes that can never be hidden.
Enterprise Software Engineering - Human + AI
Contact Us
© 2026 - Copyright. All Rights reserved Oceanlab
Location
Global Headquarters
21 Merchant Road, 3rd Floor, Singapore 058267
Main corporate office and leadership operations
North America Office
548 Market Street, PMB 12345, San Francisco, CA 94104
Client operations and business development
India Office
402 Shivalik Shilp II, SG Highway, Ahmedabad 380015
Engineering and delivery center
Enterprise Software Engineering - Human + AI
Contact Us
Locations
Global Headquarters
21 Merchant Road, 3rd Floor, Singapore 058267
Main corporate office and leadership operations
North America Office
548 Market Street, PMB 12345, San Francisco, CA 94104
Client operations and business development
India Office
402 Shivalik Shilp II, SG Highway, Ahmedabad 380015
Engineering and delivery center
© 2026 - Copyright. All Rights reserved Oceanlab