The EU school programme teaches children that fruit, vegetables and milk are not only healthy, but also taste delicious. Every year, the EU makes a total of 250 million euros available to its member states for this purpose. Funding is provided for the delivery of fruit & vegetables and milk from regionally authorised suppliers to eligible schools and daycare centres. North Rhine-Westphalia is seizing the opportunities offered by the EU school programme.
We were asked to manage the TYPO3 website for the Ministry of Agriculture and Consumer Protection NRW (MLV NRW) for the programme. We had an exciting project start ahead of us: an optimised search function was required for suppliers and facilities (schools and daycare centres) participating in the programme. The aim was to enable approved suppliers and subsidised facilities to find each other more quickly so that they could then take advantage of the funding.
The website www.schulobst-milch.nrw.de already had a rudimentary search function for suppliers and facilities in the Fruit & Vegetables programme section. However, this was in need of considerable visual improvement and was difficult to use for data maintenance. Only simple PDF lists were available for download for the milk section of the programme.
The new search functions
These various sources and displays were now to be consolidated and, of course, made more user-friendly. As a result, there are now two search functions on the website:
- A delivery company search with all authorised 160 delivery companies for fruit & vegetables and milk. Schools and daycare centres can easily find and contact suitable businesses here.
- A facility search with all 1,700 currently funded schools and daycare centres for both parts of the programme. Suppliers can also actively search for new customers in their delivery area.
Both searches show the user all available results on a map, colour-coded according to their programme affiliation. This allows users to zoom directly into the map and find and contact facilities or suppliers in their area.
There are also useful filter functions that filter the list of suppliers or facilities below according to your own preferences. Here you can filter by the fruit & vegetables or milk section of the programme as well as by location, such as city, district or surrounding area. This allows users to easily customise the results and quickly find the right partner.
In order for the addresses of the suppliers and facilities to be displayed on the map and for the radius search to work, we had to enrich the address data supplied with their geo-coordinates. The facilities are re-imported annually after funding is approved and automatically enriched with the coordinates via an API connection to nominatim.openstreetmap.org developed by us.
Management of the data records
We use the TYPO3 extension tt_address to manage the address data. This allows both employees of the MLV NRW and employees of the State Office for Nature, Environment and Consumer Protection (LANUV) to easily edit the entries themselves and add new ones.
The result is two search functions with a user-friendly and intuitive user interface. The programme's sponsored participants can now quickly find the right supplier or suitable facilities in their area without having to trawl through long PDF lists. MLV NRW has thus taken another important step towards digitalisation, both to optimise its own processes and to make the use of the funding programme even more attractive and easier thanks to modern technologies. We are delighted to have provided our new customer with significant support both conceptually and during development.
