Selected work — Case study
The Butchery System
Systems design & build—2026 · Mangaroa Farms · Upper Hutt, Aotearoa
Visit the storefrontWhen Mangaroa Farms opened its on-farm butchery, it needed more than knives and a chiller — it needed an operating system. I built the software that runs it, from cut request to scale label to shelf to storefront.
The brief
The farm brings its beef and lamb all the way home — raised, processed and sold from the same valley. But a working butchery is a data problem wearing an apron: every animal becomes dozens of cuts, every cut needs a label, a barcode, a price and a home — fresh in the farm-shop cabinet or frozen for online orders — and the numbers have to agree at the end of the week.
The brief: build the operating system. Cut requests in, labelled packs out, one source of truth the whole crew can read — and a storefront worthy of the meat.
Outcomes
100%
Of packs traceable back to their animal
2
Sales channels reconciled from one source of truth
200+
Automated tests behind the counter
95
Lighthouse performance on the storefront
The approach
- 01
Walk the floor
Built beside the people who use it — the butcher at the bench, the shop crew at the counter. Every screen earned its place mid-shift, and an in-app report button means the feedback loop never closed.
- 02
Keep their tools
The crew already ran on a spreadsheet, so the spreadsheet stayed. The software reads and writes the ledger they trust instead of forcing a new system on a working shop.
- 03
Scan-first
A pack is scanned once at the bench and the whole chain updates — stock, channel, price. Separate barcode lanes keep fresh cabinet packs and frozen online packs from ever being confused.
- 04
Traceability by design
Every order is numbered, every carcass is tagged, and the tag is printed on every label. Any pack in the cabinet traces back through the system to the animal and the paddock it came from.
- 05
A storefront worthy of it
meat.mangaroa.org — a fast, static storefront with honest SEO: regenerative and home-processed, stated plainly, never dressed up as something it isn't.
Technology
Admin + scanner apps
A web admin for cut requests, stock, transfers and reporting — plus a scanner station beside the scale, built to queue offline and catch up when the shed wifi does.
Scale & label integration
The commercial scale's label system, tamed through its API — carcass tags and thaw guidance printed on every label, pushed to the device in seconds.
Shopify, twice over
One catalogue feeding the farm-shop point-of-sale and the online store — fresh and frozen kept honest by their barcode lanes, stock reconciled by read-back checks.
The ledger, kept
Google Sheets stayed the crew's source of truth — wrapped in software that validates, reconciles and reports rather than replacing what already worked.
Paddock to pack
The whole chain lives in the same valley — the hills, the yards, the bench and the storefront.
Taste the results
The storefront this system feeds is live — regenerative beef and lamb, delivered across the North Island.
Connected work