School meals — digital, without the Excel pain
Parents order and pay the caterer directly. BuT subsidies run on autopilot. The school only co-signs the aggregated invoice — and nothing else.
What makes school meals painful today
Every staff room knows the drill.
BuT paperwork on the teacher's desk
Office or principal has to collect decisions, reconcile orders, chase co-payments. Hours per week, gone.
Parents complain about the ordering app
Kitafino, MensaMax, mfs Mahlzeitenfrei … one of them is always slow, confusing or offline. The complaint email lands in the school office.
Menu published too late
The caterer emails the weekly menu on Friday 5pm — parents have no time to order. Kids bring sandwiches instead.
Cash at the front desk
Cash boxes, forgotten wallets, lost receipts — and somehow money is missing again at the end of the week.
How Mega Meal takes the load off the school
Get the school out of payment processing — caterers and parents settle directly.
Parents pay the caterer directly
Stripe Connect routes the money straight from parent to caterer. No school bank account, no prepayments, no outstanding balances.
BuT funders pay directly
We wire up the integration with the BuT funder. The school signs the aggregated invoice once — the system handles the rest.
Full control without paper trails
School holidays and public holidays are imported automatically based on your federal state. Field trip, off-site day, or project week? The school enters group-specific closures directly — the affected classes see straight away that ordering is locked for that day. No slips, no phone calls, no duplicate orders.
Caterer detail page + contact in the app
Parents see the caterer with profile and contact details and can ask a question directly from the app. Order history including a PDF receipt per order.
What Mega Meal actually does in your school
Features that are live today in the caterer portal and the parent app.
School holidays for all 16 German states
You pick the federal state — Mega Meal pulls holidays from ferien-api.de and creates closure periods for the institution, re-importable per year.
Public holidays per federal state
Spatie Holidays delivers public holidays in the correct regional flavour (Corpus Christi in BY, not in BE). One click per school year in the portal.
BuT decision upload in the app
Parents photograph or upload the decision (PDF, JPG, PNG). The caterer reviews and approves in the portal. Status pending → approved → expired runs automatically.
Cascading order cut-offs
Product-specific beats category, category beats institution. Per weekday. Pizza until Thursday 14:00, default menu until Monday 8:00.
Cancellation cut-offs separate from order cut-offs
Order until Monday 8:00, cancel until Sunday 18:00. Per weekday, per product, per category — DeadlineType::Cancel is a separate axis.
Per-class closures and per-class subsidies
Field trip on Wednesday? Create a ClosurePeriod for that single class. Classes can also disable categories — the class admin controls it.
Stripe Connect: parents pay the caterer directly
Card, SEPA, Apple Pay, Google Pay, PayPal, bank transfer — all via the caterer's Stripe account. The school touches zero banking.
Family login with siblings
One parent account, multiple kids as eater profiles (parent_eater_profile_id). Co-owners can co-manage — the second parent sees everything.
Allergies per child, warn dialog before ordering
Diet tags per eater profile (vegan, lactose, gluten…). When the product matches a tag, the app shows a confirm dialog before checkout.
PDF receipt per order
Parents get a DomPDF receipt per order plus a monthly summary. The caterer can regenerate PDFs / XLSX in the portal at any time.
BuT integration: set up once, runs forever
Parents with a BuT decision upload their decision and proof in the app, the caterer approves in the portal. BuT charges go to the funder instead of the parents — aggregated invoice with PDF and XLSX attachment is generated in the caterer portal.
What schools love most: No more cash boxes. Parents complain to Mega Meal or directly to the caterer — not in the school office inbox.
مقدمو الطعام الذين يستخدمون Mega Meal
اختر مقدّم الطعام وادخل إلى التطبيق مباشرة.
Common questions from schools
What does Mega Meal cost the school?
Nothing. Caterers and parents carry the cost. The school neither licenses software nor assigns staff — we deliver the system.
Do we need to buy hardware?
No. Parents order from their phone. The caterer needs at most one tablet for the daily overview — usually already on site.
How does the migration from the old provider work?
We run it together with the caterer. Parents get a letter with a QR code, sign up in two minutes — done. No training day required.
What about parents without smartphones?
We offer a no-install web client. An old laptop is enough — and parents can manage multiple siblings in one go.
Digital school meals — without the staff-room Excel
Recommend your caterer for Mega Meal — we handle onboarding. The school just has to say: we want this.