Late in 2012 as I began to spend less time doing software consulting and more time working with Carly on Kitchening & Co., I spent a lot of time looking for good software to help us figure out our recipe costs to determine whether our recipes were profitable. Much to my chagrin, I couldn’t find anything. There was a bunch of old, clunky Windows-based software, there was expensive software ($5000/seat), there was impossible-to-use enterprise software — but there wasn’t any software for normal, small businesses trying to make a go of it.
Give that I couldn’t find anything I liked, I did what any normal software developer would do: I wrote some software (in this case a web application) to calculate our recipe costs.
It made my life so much easier, that I couldn’t help think that it would be easy to turn into an affordable product for other small food businesses experiencing the same problems. Four years, thousands of users and hundreds of customers later, it turns out I probably wasn’t wrong. To this day I continue to be excited by the emails I receive from customers who are “over” their “manual spreadsheet”. I received an email from Jenna Perreault (owner of Delish Gluten Free) recently who said “Recipe Cost Calculator has saved my life”.
If you run a food business and need good tools — check out Recipe Cost Calculator and see if it helps. I’d love to hear from you.