GaDOE wanted a website that would make daily tasks easier and foster collaboration among the statewide school nutrition community–including students. We delivered by cooking up some digital innovation!
The Georgia Department of Education (GaDOE) School Nutrition team shapes the nutritional guidance for students across the state. They came to us with a bold vision: a one-of-a-kind culinary website to support and engage with Georgia’s school nutrition stakeholders. With nothing like it available as a free resource online, this site is already attracting national attention.
Before we rolled up our sleeves, GaDOE’s culinary resources were scattered across their main website. School nutrition pros had a hard time finding what they needed and there were a lot of chefs in the kitchen patchworking together content the best they could. Here’s where they stood:
The School Nutrition team’s mission is to provide students with healthy, nutritious meals. What they needed was a modernized enterprise website platform that could support their daily work while making sure multiple people can work on the website without things going haywire.
The GaDOE team needed a digital overhaul. We delivered. Here’s what we built together:
The crown jewel of the project is the custom-built Menu Matrix, a first-of-its-kind tool for school nutrition professionals. Through collaborative rounds of refinements with GaDOE, we’ve developed an innovative and elegant feature that allows any website visitor to:
We built this custom menu matrix from scratch using advanced PHP, JavaScript and AJAX techniques, ensuring a smooth, responsive user experience even when handling complex data.
We created a custom post type (CPT) for recipes, which is a fancy way of saying we built a specialized content management system just for recipes. Here’s what it can do:
We collaborated closely with GaDOE to fully capture their brand and create a website that’s not only visually stunning but also highly functional:
We made sure that food safety was a top priority by incorporating standardized critical control steps into the recipe management system. Here’s how it works:
We created a one-stop-shop for school nutrition pros, serving up:
The new GaDOE culinary website is already making a big difference for school nutrition across Georgia. Capturing national attention for its custom functionality and usability for all users, the Menu Matrix streamlines meal planning and offers a free resource to create compliant, varied weekly menus with far less effort. The new recipe database also centralized recipe sharing, sparking collaboration and new ideas among schools.
The updated design is user-friendly, allowing users to quickly find the resources they need. New pages showcase student contributions as well as culinary team training and kitchen skills resources, inspiring more participation across school nutrition programs. Robust caching and database optimization keep the site running smoothly, while the flexible, extensible codebase is ready for future growth and new features. Most importantly, the platform fosters collaboration among community stakeholders, ensuring Georgia students get the nutrition they need to thrive.
As the culinary website continues to serve Georgia’s school nutrition community, we’re excited to explore future possible enhancements, including: