Refinery29 engineer Travis Kaufman. Courtesy of Refinery29 When you're a fast-growing media company, even coordinating lunchtime deliveries can become a challenge.

With more than 200 people — 60% more than in 2013 — fashion and lifestyle media company Refinery29 is experiencing a growth spurt. Still, there have been some growing pains.

Front-desk employees (or First Impressionists, as they're known at Refinery29) have become so inundated with takeout orders that it's impossible to send individual emails to employees when lunches arrive.

"The problem was that we would get bombarded with emails for lunch orders that did not have any specific person associated with them," Travis Kaufman, a senior platform engineer at Refinery29, told Business Insider.

"Stopping everything you're doing to respond to an email notification takes more time and mental energy than most people think, and when the email has nothing to do with you it's a waste of precious time."

Refinery29 says there are usually between 50 and 75 lunch deliveries a day. Inevitably the entire company would be flooded with emails with subject lines like "Dig Inn at the front with no name" and "Fries...?"

Kaufman decided to do something to solve the email bloat.

"The solve was not that difficult from a technical perspective, so I just went ahead and built it," he said.

Kaufman spent a day and a half using a variety of open-source software — NodeJS, ExpressJS, AngularJS, Redis, and Twitter Bootstrap — to create a web app he called R29 Lunch Box. The app allows people who ordered lunch for delivery to subscribe to lunch alerts, leaving everyone else in the company off the email.

It may seem minor, but even the higher-ups at Refinery29 say this lunch hack has helped to streamline lunchtime.

"Overall, it's a way for us to maintain productivity and help our employees work efficiently," Philippe von Borries, co-founder and CEO of Refinery29, said to Business Insider. "My inbox is grateful!"

And Kaufman has plans to make it even better.

"I have a lot of ideas for how to improve it going forward, such as real-time updates to the lunch feed, better UX, and auto-unsubscribes once a lunch is claimed," Kaufman said. "As an engineer at a hyper-growth media company, it's important that I stay focused on building solutions to the myriad of interesting challenges a company like Refinery29 faces."

