How a Michigan food truck fills 250+ STFU event permits in 30 minutes instead of 40 hours
Kona Ice of Utica is a mobile shaved-ice vendor serving 250+ events each season across Macomb County, Michigan. As a licensed Special Transitory Food Unit (STFU), it sends Michigan's Notification of Intent to Operate a Special Transitory Food Unit at least four business days before every event. Typing those forms one at a time took 40+ hours a season. With Instafill.ai filling them in one batch from the event spreadsheet, the whole season takes 25–30 minutes.
At a glance
- Company Kona Ice of Utica
- Industry Mobile food service (shaved ice)
- Location Macomb County, Michigan
- Forms MDARD Notification of Intent to Operate a Special Transitory Food Unit (STFU)
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Results
25–30 min for a season of STFU forms, down from 40+ hours
250+ event notifications filled per season
~$800 of seasonal labor saved each season - Form categories Permit forms, Permit application forms
The challenge
Every event needed its own copy of the same MDARD STFU PDF. The vendor's name, address and license details repeat on every form; the event's dates, location, hours and local health department change each time. The form also has Yes/No checkboxes, such as "OK to Text?" and "Paid evaluation?".
The crews work on the move, from phones and tablets, where ticking small checkboxes is easy to get wrong. The old routine was copying each event from a spreadsheet into its own PDF, about 8 minutes a form, and in peak season a mistake or a delay could mean missing the four-day notice.
The solution
Kona Ice keeps its event schedule in a spreadsheet, as before. The spreadsheet goes into batch filling from a spreadsheet, which maps each column to the matching field on the STFU form and produces one completed PDF per event: start and end dates, the operation site address, hours, the local health department and, where it applies, the county of the license.
The checkboxes follow the data too. "OK to Text?" and "Paid evaluation?" are ticked Yes or No from each event's record, with nobody tapping boxes on a small screen. The staff run the whole workflow from a phone or tablet.
Before the first run, the Instafill.ai team fine-tuned the AI for the STFU form, a one-time step of 1–2 business days for which Kona Ice supplied the PDF and the data for the batch. After it, every field came out right.
The results
| By hand | With Instafill.ai | |
|---|---|---|
| One STFU form | About 8 minutes | Part of one batch |
| A season of 250+ events | 40+ hours of entry | 25–30 minutes |
| Accuracy | Depends on who types; prone to typos | 100% after the one-time fine-tune |
| Checkboxes | Ticked by hand on a phone | Set from each event's data |
At about $20 an hour for seasonal staff, the 40 hours come to roughly $800 a season in labor. Because the form is already tuned, next season's schedule goes through the same way: upload the new spreadsheet (.csv, .tsv, .xlsx or .xls) and the PDFs come back in minutes, ready for the team to review and email to the health department.
The STFU Notification of Intent
The Notification of Intent to Operate a Special Transitory Food Unit (STFU) is the Michigan Department of Agriculture and Rural Development (MDARD) form that a licensed STFU, such as a food truck, sends before serving at an event. It must be received four business days before the event.
It asks for the unit's name, operator, business address, license number and cell number, the event's name, dates and hours, the operation site and its address, and the local health department where the unit is licensed, or the county if MDARD licensed it.
Check MDARD's licensing page for local health departments for the current version of the form.
