Good News Cafe - Smart Food Delivery Platform

Good News Cafe and Providence Cafe & Bakery are part of iFood Pte Ltd, a Singapore group established in 2005 and 2015 respectively. Founded by Alvin Sabai after more than a decade in French and American bakery chains, the business is run as a registered social enterprise with a mission to offer employment to the Silver generation and to ensure no one is disadvantaged by age, gender or race. Both cafes serve the same range of freshly baked goods, with Providence Cafe & Bakery operating as a MUIS-certified Halal kitchen. The cafes operate a public outlet at Toa Payoh alongside canteen locations across many MOE schools and junior colleges, and they take on catering for meetings and events.

A cafe and bakery that wants to sell and cater online needs more than a brochure website. Customers expect to browse the range of baked goods, savouries and sweet treats, add items to a cart, and place an order without phone calls or back-and-forth. Catering enquiries need to flow to the right kitchen - in this case the Halal-certified Providence outlets - and the storefront has to clearly separate outlets that are open to the public from canteen locations reserved for MOE staff and students. Doing this through a self-owned ordering site, rather than relying solely on third-party food-delivery marketplaces, lets the business keep the customer relationship and avoid the commissions those platforms charge on every order.

We built Good News Cafe a self-owned ordering storefront for its baked goods and catering. The site presents the menu of freshly baked goods, savouries and sweet treats, lets visitors add items to a live shopping cart that stays visible in the header as they browse, and carries the brand's social-enterprise story across the homepage, an About page and a Contact page. The Contact page lists every outlet with full address and phone details, clearly separating the public Toa Payoh cafe from the MOE school and junior-college canteens reserved for staff and students, and it states that catering orders are handled through the MUIS Halal-certified Providence Cafe & Bakery outlets. The result is a single online front door the business owns, where customers can explore the range and order directly.

What other businesses can take from this:

• A self-owned ordering site keeps the customer relationship in your hands and avoids paying a commission on every order to third-party delivery marketplaces.
• A persistent, always-visible cart lets customers build an order while they browse, which matters when an order is many small items rather than one big purchase.
• When some locations are public and others are restricted (here, MOE-only canteens), make that distinction explicit on the site so customers never turn up where they cannot order.
• Lead with what makes you different - the social-enterprise mission and the Halal certification are stated up front, because for many customers those are the deciding factors.
• If your kitchen has a specific certification or fulfilment path for catering, route those orders to the right outlet on the site rather than leaving customers to guess.