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Case study · Food truck

La Barata Taquería

A taquería on wheels whose whole day (orders, kitchen, payments, catering, even where it's parked) runs on software we built and run.

See it live at labarata.com

La Barata Taquería's live storefront: bilingual hero with the green food truck, order-now call to action, and DoorDash link
The live storefront: English and Spanish, order-ahead, and delivery.
The starting point

A great truck, running on paper and DMs

La Barata's birria had no problem drawing a line. The operation around it was the hard part: phone orders competing with the window, catering requests (the truck's biggest earner) arriving by text and Instagram and getting lost, and a truck that moves around town while customers guess where it is.

The owner didn't need an app for the sake of an app. They needed the line to move, the kitchen to see orders clearly, the money to reconcile, and catering to stop leaking. So that's what we built, one piece at a time, shipped live, each piece earning the next.

What customers see

Order ahead, find the truck, book the party

A menu with real photos and live prices, a catering page that turns "can you do our wedding?" into an organized request, and a Find-Us page that always knows where the truck is parked today.

The live menu: birria dishes with photography, prices, category filters, and add-to-cart
The catering request wizard: event type, date, headcount and contact details, in English and Spanish
The Find-Us page with the truck's current location and directions

The truck moves. The software keeps up.

The crew confirms today's spot from the truck with one tap. From that moment the website, the checkout, and every "your order is ready" message carry the live location. If the truck moved after someone ordered, their ready message says so, with a map pin. Nobody drives to yesterday's corner.

Behind the window

A day on the truck

  1. 1

    An order comes in

    It lands on the kitchen board with a chime: items, quantities, notes, pickup time. The customer gets a confirmation with their order number.

  2. 2

    The crew works the board

    New → preparing → ready, tap by tap. Phone numbers are hidden until an operator signs in; every money action is locked behind roles.

  3. 3

    “Ready!” with the right address

    The ready message carries the truck's live spot. Refunds and cancellations, when they happen, take one tap and leave a full audit trail.

  4. 4

    The day closes clean

    Sales, Wyoming sales tax, tips and card totals reconcile at end of day. Catering requests from the site sit in a queue the owner reviews and confirms.

The storefront on a phone, where most of La Barata's orders happen
Most orders happen on a phone, in line, hungry.
Under the hood

Built right. Kept running.

This platform gets the same engineering a funded startup buys, because it handles the same thing: real money.

600+

automated tests across storefront, kitchen and backend

2

languages: every customer surface in English and Spanish

1-tap

location updates, refunds and end-of-day close

100%

of money actions audit-trailed to an operator

  • Stripe payments with capture, refund and dispute handling
  • Role-gated back office: cashier vs manager permissions
  • Transactional email that knows the truck's live location
  • Documented runbooks + full git history the owner keeps

Your business could run like this.

If your counter has a sticky-note problem too, the intro call is where to start.

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