Foodlay KDS | Kitchen Display System Desktop Add-on

Foodlay KDS is a desktop Kitchen Display System for restaurants, cafes, cloud kitchens, and food businesses. It runs as a native app on Windows, macOS, and Linux and turns any kitchen screen into a live order board: orders from every channel — POS counter, website, and mobile app — land on a three-column board (New → Cooking → Ready) with one-tap bumping, new-order chimes, ticket-age timers, an all-day batch view, and KOT thermal printing. Every ticket is mirrored into a local SQLite database, so the board survives restarts and network drops, and status bumps queue locally and sync back the moment the connection returns.

⚠️ Requires the Foodlay Admin & Web Panel (separate purchase). This item is the kitchen display client only. It connects to a running installation of the Foodlay Admin & Web Panel — the Laravel-based server product, which is a separate purchase and is not included in this package. Without that server, the KDS cannot log in or receive orders. The documentation includes a dedicated “Connecting to Your Server” guide covering every configuration value with concrete examples.

Key Features

• Live order board — a three-column New / Cooking / Ready board that polls your server and diffs every cycle: new tickets chime and pulse until a chef acknowledges them, and status changes made elsewhere (admin panel, a second kitchen screen) reconcile automatically
• One-tap bumping — Accept → Start cooking → Ready → Complete, with the correct ending per order type (takeaway is picked from the counter, dine-in is delivered, delivery tickets wait for the rider). One-step Recall undoes an accidental tap, and any of today’s finished tickets can be recalled from History
• Cancellations you can’t miss — a cancelled order stays on the board under a red alarm overlay with its own distinct sound until a chef dismisses it; it is never silently removed while food may still be on the stove
• Ticket-age timers — each ticket ages neutral → amber → red at thresholds you set, and the clock is the server’s, so a kitchen PC with a wrong system time can’t hide a late order
• All-day view — aggregated item totals across every new and cooking ticket, so the line can batch-cook “14 × Chicken Biryani” instead of reading twenty cards
• Offline-resilient — the full board lives in a local SQLite mirror; when the network drops the screen keeps working, bumps are queued, and everything pushes automatically on reconnect with a clear connection pill on screen
• KOT thermal printing — clean kitchen tickets in large type (no prices), with variants, add-ons, and customer notes, printed on demand or auto-printed the moment an order arrives
• Priced invoice printing — a full customer receipt (items, add-ons, discounts, taxes, service charges, payment method and paid/unpaid state) pulled fresh from the server at print time, with the business name and address taken from your admin panel
• Branch scoping & filters — pick the kitchen’s branch and see only its orders (optionally including unassigned ones); filter by order type (delivery / takeaway / dine-in) and by source (POS / Web / App) so a station only sees what it cooks
• Built for a kitchen screen — fullscreen mode, three text-size steps for reading from across the pass, adjustable alert volume with repeating alerts for unacknowledged tickets, and a mute toggle
• Keyboard shortcuts — A all-day panel, M mute, F fullscreen, R sync now
• 6 UI languages — English, Bengali, Spanish, Arabic (full RTL), Hindi, French. The chosen language is also sent to your server, so item and add-on names print on tickets in the kitchen’s own language
• Admin or employee sign-in — sign in with an admin account, or with a limited kitchen-staff employee account that can only read orders and update their status. Optional two-factor step supported. The token stays in the app’s secure main process and never touches the browser layer
• White-label ready — app name, application ID, icons, and accent color are all configurable; the brand color re-themes the running app live from Settings

Technical Specifications

• Desktop shell: Electron 33
• Frontend: Vue 3.5 (Composition API), Pinia 2, Vue Router 4
• Language: JavaScript (modern ES modules) — clean, readable, unminified source
• Styling: Tailwind CSS 3
• Local database: SQLite via better-sqlite3 11 (WAL mode)
• Printing: node-thermal-printer 4 (ESC/POS — Epson, Star, and compatibles) over network (TCP), USB / serial device, CUPS queue, or Windows printer share
• Networking: Axios with JWT bearer authentication
• Build tooling: electron-vite 2 + electron-builder 25
• Build targets: Windows portable ZIP (unzip and run — no installer or admin rights needed), macOS (.dmg / .zip), Linux (.deb / .AppImage)
• Supported OS: Windows 10+, macOS 11+, Ubuntu 20.04+ (and other modern distros via AppImage)
• Security: context isolation on, node integration off, sandboxed IPC surface, strict CSP; the auth token is bound to the server it was issued for