“I want a product like UberEats” — and then we never stopped

Lejo is a food delivery marketplace operating in Canada. The brief arrived as a single sentence: “I want a product like UberEats and SkipTheDishes.”

That sentence describes one of the most operationally demanding products in consumer software, in a market where the incumbents have enormous budgets and have already set what customers expect. What followed was not a project with an end date. We have built, scaled and rebuilt the ecosystem repeatedly as demand and Canadian expectations moved.

Food delivery is deceptively hard because three groups use it simultaneously and none of them will wait.

A customer wants live tracking and an accurate arrival time. A courier wants the next job, a clean route and no ambiguity about where to collect. A restaurant wants orders that arrive in a rhythm the kitchen can absorb, not a burst that collides with the lunch rush. Each side has to stay correct while the other two are actively changing state.

On top of that, every one of those users has already used an incumbent app. There is no tolerance for a learning curve and no credit for being new.

We built three applications — customer, courier and restaurant — against shared services, so order state stays consistent across all of them rather than being reconciled after the fact. When a courier accepts a job, the customer and the kitchen learn about it from the same source of truth.

The operations tooling behind them handles dispatch, assignment and the exceptions that make up most of the real work: a courier who cannot find the door, a restaurant that is running twenty minutes behind, an order that needs to be re-assigned mid-route.

The ecosystem has been scaled and revamped several times rather than shipped once and left. Delivery expectations in Canada in 2025 are not what they were at launch, and the product has had to move with them.

Lejo operates as a full three-sided delivery marketplace in Canada, with more than 15,000 downloads and over 10,000 orders fulfilled through the platform.

This has never been a fixed-scope engagement. It has been continuous development against a market that keeps moving, which is the only way a delivery product stays usable.

Lejo is three native-quality apps built against one set of shared services. Read more about how we approach mobile app development, or see the rest of our work.