A family farm near Newquay wanted to sell its food beyond the farm gate. Not a catalogue of products in a standard shopping cart, but food boxes — built weekly, delivered to the door, subscribed to rather than bought. Nothing off the shelf did that properly, so FullyCoded built the platform that does. It handles box creation, subscriptions, substitutions, automatic payments, repeat ordering, price adjustment and reporting, and it now runs a delivery operation covering Cornwall.
The starting point
Trevilley Farm has been in the same family for over a century, growing vegetables and raising beef, lamb and bronze turkeys. Its customers were people who came to it. The ambition was a proper online business: Cornish produce, local suppliers, organics and wholefoods, delivered anywhere in the county for a pound.
That is a harder software problem than it sounds, and the requirements made it harder still. A food box is not a product with a fixed price sitting on a shelf. Its contents change with the season and with what the farm has that week. Customers do not buy it once; they subscribe, weekly or fortnightly, and expect it to keep arriving without being asked. They want the parts they do not eat taken out and something else put in. And when the contents or the market move, the price has to move with them — before the payment is taken, not after.
Standard ecommerce platforms model none of that. The realistic alternative was a stack of subscription, substitution and pricing plugins fighting each other, with staff holding the gaps together by hand every week — exactly the kind of fragile arrangement that stops a business growing. The decision was made to build the thing properly.
What we built
Box creation. The team builds boxes from their own stock — contents, sizes, prices, how long a box runs. When the season turns or supply changes, the box changes with it, in minutes, without a developer.
Subscriptions the customer controls. Weekly, fortnightly or one-off, with no minimum commitment. Customers pause, skip, change frequency, switch box or reorder from their history and favourites, all from their own account. The business grows without the phone ringing more.
Substitutions. Customers take out what they do not want and put in what they do, inside rules the business sets. It is the feature that turns a fixed box into something people stay subscribed to for years — and it is the one no generic platform gets right.
Automatic payments and repeat orders. Each cycle generates its order and takes its payment on its own. Predictable recurring revenue on one side, a delivery rather than an invoice on the other.
Adjustable pricing. A substitution that costs more, a supplier price that has moved, a one-off arrangement for a particular customer — the price can be corrected before the payment is taken, instead of the margin being quietly absorbed or an order unpicked afterwards.
Delivery logistics. Delivery days, addresses and safe-place instructions are held against the customer, so orders can be picked and routed as a round rather than as a pile of unrelated parcels.
Reporting. Picking lists and delivery rounds for this week; subscribers, revenue and product movement for this month. One system, both answers.
Support is part of the product
An online shop that goes down is a shop with the doors locked. For a business whose entire trade runs through one application, the work after launch matters as much as the work before it, and it is the part most agencies quietly stop doing.
FullyCoded hosts, monitors and maintains the platform, and answers when something needs answering. That relationship is why the application has been able to keep growing with the business rather than being replaced by it.
“The team at Fully Coded were fundamental in turning the vision of our website into reality. Our requirements were not straightforward and they were all catered for with a bespoke website platform. As an online business, our website is critical and Fully Coded ensured that it is a great representation of our brand.
Fully Coded have also provided first class timely support after launch. The importance of this is often overlooked and has proven invaluable.
Highly recommended! Thanks to Mark and the team.”
— Real Food Box
Where it is now
What began as boxes going out from a farm near Newquay is a delivery operation running across Cornwall, with the round still widening. Adding boxes, customers and delivery areas is an operational decision now, not a development project.
Because Real Food Box owns the platform rather than renting it, the roadmap belongs to the business. What gets built next comes from what the farm needs, not from what a platform vendor decides to release this quarter.
If the software on the shelf does not fit how your business actually works, that is the work we do. Tell us what you are trying to build.