Weekly menu rotation, how does the 8-12 meal cycle actually work?

Architecturally it’s a custom Magento entity I call menu_week with fields: week_starts_on, week_ends_on, ship_date_range, cutoff_datetime, is_active. Each menu_week has a related collection of recipe entities (8-12 typically). The chef admin uploads each recipe with hero photo, ingredients list, allergen flags, dietary tags (keto / paleo / vegan / GF / DF / low-cal / nut-free / shellfish-free / kid-friendly), prep time, calorie count per serving, and a 2-3 sentence description.

On the customer side, the menu page shows the current week’s 8-12 recipes, filtered by the customer’s saved dietary profile. Customer picks 4-6 meals by Wednesday 11:59pm cutoff (configurable per region). If they don’t pick, an auto-fill cron runs at cutoff + 1 hour using their dietary preferences and rotation history (avoid repeats from the last 4 weeks). Box ships Thursday morning.

The chef admin UI is the make-or-break piece. Chefs are not engineers. The UI has to feel like a recipe planner, not a Magento admin form. I usually build a custom React-in-iframe interface for the kitchen team, talking to Magento via REST.