Trusted Definitions Keep Growth on Track at My Muscle Chef
My Muscle Chef is Australia’s number one food delivery service for five consecutive years. Every month, the company delivers more than two million freshly prepared high protein meals to more than 4,500 suburbs across the country. With this scale comes a simple reality. High growth creates high data volume, and high data volume quickly exposes weak points in how data is described, understood, and governed. This story is not only about one food delivery company. It reflects what many fast growing businesses face. As operations scale, it becomes easy to lose clarity about data, even when the business is
Challenge
My Muscle Chef is growing, and with that pace of growth came a concern. It would become easy to lose track of where data is stored and harder to keep everyone aligned on what the data means. The company wanted a better overview of its data infrastructure and a way to describe data consistently, including business data lineage captured in the data catalog.
The issue was not a single dashboard or a single source. It was the risk that growth would outpace shared understanding.
It was becoming easier to lose track of where data was stored across the business.
It was becoming harder to get everyone on the same page about data descriptions.
The business wanted to describe dashboards through clear requirements so reports reflect what they should fulfil and display.
There was a need to connect business terms to real data sources through business data lineage.
To keep reporting and decision making reliable as the company scaled, My Muscle Chef needed a structured way to move from requirements and business terms to data catalog metadata and real data sources.
Project in numbers
Australia’s number one food delivery service
meals delivered every month
suburbs served across Australia
to enable connectors to Google BigQuery and MongoDB
Solution
The shift in thinking was straightforward. Start with shared meaning and structured documentation, then connect it to the technical reality.
My Muscle Chef adopted Accurity Business Glossary and Data Catalog and began documenting as much as possible. Requirements were used to describe dashboards, outlining what each dashboard should fulfil and display. Once dashboard requirements were documented, My Muscle Chef could track which metrics and business terms should be included.
Based on these requirements, the team defined crucial business terms in the business glossary and then expanded to additional terms needed for calculations. Relationships between business terms could be visualised using knowledge graphs, improving visibility into how terms relate and how calculations connect.
To support alignment beyond the data team, My Muscle Chef used Accurity’s free Browser Dictionary extension. It scans web applications for business terms and shows the approved definition stored in the business glossary.
With business terms established, My Muscle Chef moved to the data catalog. Metadata was retrieved from data sources to create a blueprint of the IT data landscape. While standard connectors were not initially available for the data sources used, Accurity enabled on demand connectors to Google BigQuery and MongoDB within 24 hours. Later, data profiling was also added for these sources, including document based sources such as MongoDB.
The next step was business data lineage. Once major business terms were defined for a dashboard described in requirements, My Muscle Chef began mapping business terms to parts of the data catalog. This enabled better data descriptions and clearer visibility into which data sources are used for dashboard calculations. Dashboards could also be treated as a special type of data structure in the catalog, showing the full path from requirements to real data sources.
Benefits
Although the initiative is still at an early stage, My Muscle Chef is already seeing practical benefits from the methodology and platform.
The company can think about data management in a more structured way.
Accurity provides guidance on both the application and the methodology behind it.
The approach supports proper governance over new dashboard creation.
Responsibilities are clearer and there is a strong starting point for describing existing dashboards.
The Browser Dictionary extension helps teams align on approved data descriptions.
Looking Ahead
This is the start of My Muscle Chef’s journey with Accurity. With requirements, business terms, data catalog metadata, and business data lineage brought together, the company is building the foundation for ongoing growth with clearer visibility into what data exists, what it means, and where it comes from.
By starting with requirements and shared business definitions we gained visibility into how our dashboards are built and which data they truly depend on. This clarity is essential as our business continues to scale.
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