The problem, before it was software
Thirty-two years in professional kitchens, and it was always the same story — an allergen sheet handwritten on a scrap of paper, three menu changes out of date by the time anyone actually read it. Recipe costs worked out on the back of an invoice at midnight, because there was never time to do it properly during service. Prices changed, nobody re-costed the dish, and the GP% written on the spreadsheet stopped meaning anything weeks before someone noticed.
None of that is unusual. It's just what running a kitchen involves when the paperwork has to happen around service, not instead of it.
Why nothing else fit
Every system I looked at was either built for restaurant groups with a head office and a budget to match — priced per location, sold through a demo, built around features a single kitchen never touches — or a spreadsheet held together with hope, which works fine until a second person needs the same numbers at the same time, or a supplier price change means retyping a dozen recipes by hand.
Nothing sat in between: built properly, but priced and designed for a kitchen with one site and no back office.
So I built it myself
Kitchen Control exists because I needed it — not because it looked good in a demo. The starting point was simple: get rid of the retyping. Scan an invoice instead of entering it line by line. Scan an ingredient label instead of copying the allergens out by hand. Scan a recipe instead of transcribing it from a notebook. Everything else — the live costing, the GP%, the allergen matrix, the PPDS labels — follows automatically from ingredient data once it's actually in the system, instead of being a separate job someone has to remember to do.
Every feature in it is something I actually wanted on the pass, not in a boardroom. If it wouldn't have saved me time on a Tuesday lunch service, it isn't in there.
— Matt, Head Chef & FounderMevagissey, Cornwall
Who it's actually for
Kitchen Control is built for the kitchen I ran, and the ones like it — not for a multi-site group with a procurement team. That shows up in how it's priced and how it works, not just in the marketing.
One plan, one price
£12.99/month, everything included — no per-location pricing, no allergen add-on, no sales call to find out what it costs.
Set up without help
No onboarding team or implementation project. Sign up, scan a few invoices and recipes, and it's working.
For independent kitchens
Restaurants, pubs, cafes, takeaways, bakeries, food vans, sandwich shops, cake makers, ice cream shops, outside caterers and private chefs.
Where it stands today
Kitchen Control is a small company — Kitchen Control Ltd, registered in St Austell, Cornwall — built and run by people who've worked the sections it's designed for. It isn't trying to become the next big restaurant-group platform; it's trying to stay the thing an independent kitchen can trust to get allergens and costing right without a contract, a demo or a per-location invoice.
Kitchen Control is £12.99/month, one plan, everything included — try it free for 30 days and see whether it does what a kitchen actually needs.
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