Context
A school nutrition director with a budget, a menu, and a delivery window needs to find a producer who can actually meet all three. Before the directory, that search happened through phone calls and word of mouth, which favors the producers who are already known.
Decision
I built it as a discovery problem, not a listing problem. A directory that merely holds records is a phone book; the useful thing is filtering — by product, by region, by what a buyer is able to receive — and nested categories that match how food is actually talked about rather than how it is classified.
Contribution
I led development: the search and filter interface, the nested category system, the Wagtail modernization that put publishing back in the hands of program staff, ongoing platform support, and versioned, encrypted AWS media infrastructure behind the producer photography.
Result
The directory has been online since 2019 and publicly lists more than 120 producers ready to sell to schools — produce growers, ranchers, fishers, and tribal foods. Buyer-producer connections attributable to the product are not measured, and this page does not claim them.
Learning
The feature that mattered most was the least technical one: moving publishing into Wagtail so program staff could add a producer without a developer. A public directory that depends on an engineer to stay current will not stay current. Handing the content back is what made it durable.