The challenge: When one group chat isn’t enough.

From the moment Cherie and Daniel partnered to sell charcuterie boards as a business, and not just a hobby from her kitchen, Luxe Bites grew fast. Cherie and Daniel went from two people hand-delivering 15 boards on a weekend to fielding a 400-box corporate order within their first few months. By 2022, they had full-time kitchen staff, in-house delivery drivers, and a growing list of events that required coordination across multiple locations.

For the first year and a half of Luxe Bites, one group text managed everything. Shift times, event details, addresses, client contacts—all of it went into the same thread where the kitchen team was also sharing photos of completed orders and asking questions mid-prep. If you needed to know what time you were starting tomorrow, you had to scroll back through all of it to find out.

"The team would be in the middle of something, and they'd text the group chat asking 'What time are we all coming in tomorrow?' It would just get lost by the pictures coming in from the kitchen in the morning," Cherie says.  

On the back end, their previous payroll tool had no mobile clock-in, which was a problem for a team that worked across multiple locations and was always moving. Running payroll every period felt like a task Cherie had to steel herself for. 

As Luxe Bites kept growing, adding kitchen staff, delivery drivers, and eventually an ops team, the gap between what their tools could do and what the business needed kept getting wider.

"Now with Homebase, kitchen managers just schedule time for the team and for events. There's less back and forth in the chat."
‍
— Cherie Chua, co-founder of Luxe Bites

The solution: One app connecting 4 locations and 30 people.

A Homebase flyer showed up in the mail, Cherie booked a call, and within weeks the group chat had been replaced by something that actually worked for a distributed, always-moving team. Every Luxe Bites team member got the app on their phone. Managers started publishing shifts in real time, with event details (addresses, timing, client contacts) built directly into the shift notes. Team members stopped asking where they were going and when. The answer was already in the app.

Payroll came next. Cherie had been running it manually on a tool that didn't connect to how her team actually worked. There was no mobile clock-in and no clean data flow. With Homebase, hours tracked during the week feed directly into payroll. She reviews the timesheet summary, catches anything unusual, and runs it. 

"I used to find payroll to be a really daunting thing. With Homebase, it's actually like three clicks."
‍
— Cherie Chua, co-founder of Luxe Bites

For Daniel, the value showed up in the reporting. Homebase's attendance reporting gave him something he'd never had before: a reliable, real-time view of how each team member was showing up across every location. He used it to build a quarterly bonus structure tied directly to on-time shift percentages. The effect was immediate. Team members started covering each other's shifts to protect their attendance numbers, and reliably clocking in on time for their shifts. "I love the reporting suite," Daniel says. "That's my favorite part, honestly, the data."

The accountability extended to time tracking too. When Cherie noticed staff clocking in while still in the car, she turned on geofencing and the problem disappeared. "It's just like you have to put these little barriers in," she says. "But it works."

As Luxe Bites kept growing, Cherie kept finding new ways to use Homebase alongside it. Hiring. Timesheets. And most recently, a 401(k) retirement plan through a Homebase partner for full-time team members. Health and dental are next. 

‍"I can go to Homebase and check the 401(k), check that the health benefits are there, do payroll, do hiring. It just makes life a lot easier."
‍
— Cherie Chua, co-founder of Luxe Bites

The impact: 70% less admin, more of what only they can do.

Daniel estimates that Homebase has saved their management team roughly 70% of the time they used to spend on scheduling and admin. Cherie puts it differently: across herself, their ops manager, and their kitchen managers, the team saves at least 10 hours a week combined. Setting up a next-day event—something that used to mean copy-pasting details into a group chat and hoping nothing got buried—now takes five minutes or less.

But there’s a bigger shift, too, that’s harder to quantify. A year ago, Cherie was still on the floor at events, checking every detail herself. Today, she leads creative direction, manages client relationships, and focuses on what Luxe Bites offers next: a floral line, an afternoon tea bundle, themed corporate menus. Daniel is focused on expansion: Washington DC is likely next, with a goal of eventually bringing the brand to London. Their technical director Cruz is building an integration between Homebase's API and their custom internal software, pulling everything into a single operational view.

None of that was possible when the business was running on group texts and manual payroll.

"The beauty of Homebase is that I didn't even have to train anyone," Cherie says. For a business with the food industry's notoriously high turnover, that matters every time a new team member joins. They open the app and get to work.

Luxe Bites is five years old and still moving fast. As Cherie puts it: she's always the one saying yes to the next big idea, then turning to her team to figure out how to make it happen. Having the operational foundation in place is what makes that possible.

"The more things can combine in one place, the easier it is. I go to Homebase and I can do it all."
‍
— Cherie Chua, co-founder of Luxe Bites

Expansion on the horizon.

Five years ago, Cherie and Daniel were hand-delivering 15 charcuterie boards around LA. Today they're running four commercial kitchens, shipping nationally, and building the software to help other food businesses do what they've done.

The operational foundation that got them here—payroll, scheduling, time tracking, hiring, and benefits all running through Homebase—isn't something they think about much anymore. That's the point. "I'm always like: 'Yes, we can do it, whatever you want,' Cherie says. “And then I turn around to my team and say: 'Okay, let's figure out how we're going to do this.'" When the tools are taken care of, that's the only kind of problem worth having.