Behind the Scenes: How Da Dabba Gets Built
By Da Dabba Team
Screen recordings from inside the making of Da Dabba: the first storefronts, the AI that writes menus and meal photos, the weekly poster generator, and the maps that plan a delivery day. The whole process, on camera.
We record our screens while we build Da Dabba. Partly for our own documentation, partly because the early versions of anything are funny to look back on. This post is a walk through those recordings: the storefront when it was still plain cards on cream, the kitchen tools growing their AI helpers, the delivery map learning to plan a route. If you want to see how a Dabba actually gets to a doorstep, the whole process is here.
Everything below is a real screen recording of the real app, warts included. No staging, no mockups. Scroll through and press play wherever you get curious.
## Where it started The first storefront was nothing to write home about. Plain cards, a list of meals, an add button. It worked, and that was the whole ambition at the time. Fit Boss ran on our platform URL back then; today it has its own domain, fitbossmeals.ca, with the same engine underneath. The order map was the same story: get the day's orders on a screen, group them by city, worry about beauty later. We kept these recordings on purpose. Watching them next to the current pages is the clearest picture of what iteration actually looks like.
Southern Masala, first iteration
Orders on a map, first iteration
## Teaching the kitchen dashboard to cook A kitchen builds a meal by picking its components, deciding what is a dish and what is an add-on, and setting portions and a price. Then the app takes over the annoying parts. It drafts the description. It writes an image prompt out of the actual components, down to the containers and the lighting, and shows the kitchen every word before anything is generated. The photo you see on a menu came from that flow, and the chef got to edit the prompt like a sentence instead of fighting a design tool.
Building a meal in the kitchen dashboard
Generating a meal photo with AI
## The menu that prints itself Once the week's menu lives on a calendar, turning it into a poster stopped being a design job. The week goes into a prompt, the prompt comes back as a poster, and the kitchen prints it or posts it. We tried it on Southern Masala first, then on Dakshin, to make sure it was a real feature and not a one-kitchen trick.
## Getting the food to the door Delivery day is a pile of orders that needs to become one sensible drive. The kitchen selects the day, hands the batch to a driver, and walks the statuses from confirmed to delivered. There is even a moment in the recording where the app refuses to assign orders that are not confirmed yet, which is exactly the kind of guardrail you only appreciate on a busy day. On the driver's side, the map takes the day's stops and puts them in driving order.
## What all of that looks like from the outside Customers never see any of the machinery above. They see a menu, a search bar, and a calendar. Pick a meal, pick your days, repeat it weekly or choose as you go, and change any day later without ceremony. That last part matters to us. A plan should never be a trap.
A scroll through a kitchen menu
The first version is allowed to be ugly. It is not allowed to be imaginary.
House rule
There will be more of these. We are still building, the recorder is still running, and the current design will look dated soon enough. When it does, it will join the older versions on our channel at [youtube.com/@helloPomo](https://youtube.com/@helloPomo).
Tags: build-log, behind-the-scenes, process, product-design, food-delivery, youtube.