CaterKart

Event catering runs on phone calls, spreadsheets and trust. A customer planning for 200 guests wants a fixed price before committing, but the price depends on menu, headcount, service style and which kitchen can actually take the date. Meanwhile the kitchens need orders in a form they can execute against. The hard part is not the storefront, it is that one order has to stay coherent across a customer, a coordinator and a kitchen who never share a screen, while food safety compliance stays provable throughout.

• Built the API as a NestJS modular monolith on MongoDB, choosing a document store deliberately: a catering order is a deeply nested, highly variable object — menus, per-item counts, service add-ons, event logistics — that would have fought a rigid relational schema at this stage.
• Kept the surface small and sharp: 15 endpoints across 7 modules with order management at the centre. Restraint here was the design decision, since catering platforms typically sprawl before they find their model.
• Separated ordering from inventory so partner kitchens can be onboarded, vetted and have their FSSAI licence status tracked without touching the customer-facing order flow.
• Secured it with JWT auth and request throttling from the start, because a public quote endpoint on a food business is an obvious target for scraping and abuse.
• Isolated outbound calls behind Nest’s HTTP module so partner and logistics integrations can be swapped or stubbed without disturbing order logic.
• Deployed via AWS SAM, keeping infrastructure declarative and the running cost proportional to real order volume rather than a fixed always-on bill — which matters for a business with sharp seasonal peaks around festivals and wedding dates.

• A live catering platform at caterkart.in handling buffets and CaterBox meal boxes from 30 to 500 guests.
• A vetted, FSSAI-licensed kitchen network managed independently of the customer order flow.
• Vendor dashboards and order tracking that give customer, coordinator and kitchen one shared version of the truth.
• A deliberately small API — 15 endpoints, 7 modules — that stayed legible enough to extend into live counters, décor and artists.