The challenge
Al-Hudah Restaurant Pte Ltd wanted to make Infaq, the practice of giving for the benefit of others, as simple as buying a meal. Their Jummah Briyani Infaq Project lets anyone sponsor a freshly prepared chicken briyani for a worshipper at a nearby mosque on a Friday. The idea is simple, but the operation behind it is not: sponsorships arrive all week, each Friday's batch only goes ahead once it reaches a set number of meals, sponsorships that fall short carry over to the following week, the kitchen needs a firm cut-off so it can prepare, and every sponsor expects to know what happened to their contribution. Managing that across a payment provider, spreadsheets and email threads was not going to scale.
What we did
We started with the brand. Al-Hudah has been cooking briyani, rojak and murtabak since 2006, and its original badge-style logo carried every one of those details. For a project asking people to give online, the restaurant needed an identity that was simple, confident and legible at any size, from a phone screen to a banner at the mosque. We designed a new wordmark in deep green and gold that keeps the restaurant's heritage and reads cleanly everywhere it appears.
With the identity in place, we designed and developed the whole solution, from the public website to the system the owners run it with:
- A public website at alhudah.sg that explains the project, shows this Friday's progress towards the batch and lets a sponsor choose how many meals to give and pay online in a few steps
- Sponsor accounts where a sponsor can change the amount, pause or stop a recurring sponsorship and see the meals their giving has paid for
- A backend system for the owners that groups sponsorships into weekly batches, applies the Thursday cut-off, rolls short weeks over to the next batch and gives the kitchen a clear number to cook for
- Batch emails so the owners can send updates, including photos from the distribution, to everyone in a batch at once
- Payment integration with a Singapore payment provider, with a clear separation between test and live modes so a rehearsal can never be mistaken for real money
The site is fast, secure and built to be maintained: content such as gallery photos can be added without a code change.
The results
Al-Hudah now runs the Infaq project from one system rather than a collection of tools. Sponsors get a clear, trustworthy way to give and a confirmation of where their meals went, and the owners spend their time on cooking and distribution rather than reconciling payments and sending emails one at a time. We are currently extending the system to take catering orders for the restaurant, letting customers build an order for briyani, goreng, murthabak and more with the price shown as they go. That release is coming soon.