QR-ious Innovation

From Chaos to Clarity: How We Built Traceable, Transparent Order Tracking at FreshOnTable

Back in 2019, FreshOnTable had just launched in Dubai. As the first employee and founding team member, I was wearing multiple hats — but at the heart of it all, I was a Product Manager, solving for scale, trust, and transparency in a fast-moving farm-to-fork supply chain.

We had found early product-market fit with our HORECA (hotel/restaurant/catering) customers. Orders were picking up speed. But so were the support calls.

The Operational Headache That Triggered a Product Breakthrough

Our model was designed to minimize storage and maximize freshness. Items were picked from farms daily, brought to our hub for sorting and QA, and dispatched the same night for early-morning delivery.

But this agility created opacity.

Sales and account managers were constantly fielding questions like:

• “Which farm is the spinach from?”

• “Has the QA cleared the order?”

• “Where’s the coriander that’s missing?”

Without real-time, item-level traceability, our small team was manually chasing answers across internal systems and departments. It was reactive, inefficient, and not built to scale.

As a Product Manager, I knew this wasn’t just an operational issue — it was a user experience issue. Our customers weren’t getting clarity, and our internal team was burning out trying to provide it.

Designing for Transparency, Trust, and Scale

Instead of patching the problem with more manpower, we reframed the problem:

“What if every stakeholder in the supply chain — from farm to restaurant — could see the same data, in real time?”

We built a mobile-friendly, product-level order tracking system that visualized the journey of every item, from the moment it was picked at the farm, all the way to delivery.

Each product in the order now carried:

🔍 Farm details & location
🌡 Pickup and cold storage temperature logs
✔ QA status with timestamp & user ID
🚚 Driver assignment & dispatch time
📦 Delivery confirmation

And to guarantee trust, we stored every step of this journey in a Hyperledger blockchain database, making the data immutable, transparent, and queryable for up to 60 days.

As the PM, I led the cross-functional collaboration between ops, tech, sales, and QA to ensure we captured the right data points, structured them meaningfully, and designed a UX that was intuitive even for first-time users.

Making It Effortless

We knew adoption depended on frictionless access.

So we embedded a QR code pointing to a live tracking link in:

• The order email

• The printed invoice

• And even on individual item labels

This way, the receiving team at the restaurant could simply scan and view the full journey of each product - no logins, no training, no follow-ups.

The Product-Led Results

Here’s what happened next:

📉 Support calls reduced by over 60% within the first 2 months
🔁 Order rejection rates dropped - clients had greater trust in the freshness
⚙️ Internal efficiency improved - fewer escalations, more time for proactive support
⭐ It became a USP - we didn’t just claim farm-fresh food, we proved it

For me, this wasn’t just a feature. It was a full-stack product innovation, solving for user pain, business efficiency, and brand differentiation.

What This Taught Me as a PM

Building this system reinforced some core beliefs I carry as a Product Manager:

• ✅ Operational pain is a goldmine for innovation

• 🔄 Designing with every stakeholder in mind leads to adoption at scale

• 🔐 Trust is a feature, and blockchain was our UX ally

• 📱 The best products feel invisible — a scan, a link, and instant clarity

Final Thoughts

Today, traceability and transparency are no longer nice-to-haves - they’re table stakes in supply chains. But back in 2019, we were ahead of the curve.

This project didn’t just reduce chaos. It shaped FreshOnTable’s reputation as a reliable, tech-enabled food sourcing platform. And it reminded me, once again, that product thinking isn’t just for apps - it’s for every interaction a user has, digital or physical.