What Software Do Chefs Use?

The software layers in a food business

Not every food business needs the same tools. A home baker selling at a Saturday market has different needs from a restaurant group with 40 staff. But there are consistent categories of software that appear across food businesses of all sizes. Here's how they stack up:

Not every business needs every layer. A home bakery selling PPDS products at a market primarily needs recipe/costing and allergen labelling. A busy café needs POS, recipe costing, food safety logs, and likely staff scheduling. A production kitchen supplying wholesale needs the full stack.

Recipe management software

Recipe management software is the engine room for any food business that produces food at scale. It stores your standardised recipes, scales them for different batch sizes, tracks every allergen, and calculates cost per portion automatically.

Without it, you're doing that work in a spreadsheet — which is fine until ingredient prices change, you change a recipe, or you need to produce allergen information quickly. Spreadsheets require manual updates across every affected recipe; dedicated software handles it automatically.

What to look for

• Batch scaling — scale any recipe up or down without manual maths
• Allergen tracking — flag the 14 major allergens across all sub-recipes and ingredients
• Cost per portion — real-time food cost % as ingredient prices change
• Natasha's Law label generation — produce PPDS-compliant labels directly from recipes

Options to consider

• FoodCore (UK-focused, includes costing, allergen matrix and Natasha's Law labelling) — from £19/month. See recipe management software.
• Apicbase — enterprise-grade platform for large multi-site operations; pricing on request
• ChefTec — US-focused, widely used in commercial kitchens, less optimised for UK allergen law

For small UK food businesses, FoodCore is typically the most cost-effective option that fully covers Natasha's Law requirements.

Point-of-sale (POS) systems

A POS system processes your sales transactions, tracks what you've sold, manages your menu and produces end-of-day summaries. It's essential for any business with a customer-facing counter — café, deli, market stall, restaurant — but not necessary for businesses that only sell wholesale or via pre-order.

Important: a POS system does not do recipe costing, allergen management, or HACCP records. These are entirely separate functions that require separate software. A common mistake among new food businesses is assuming their POS covers everything — it doesn't.

Top POS options in the UK

• Square — free basic plan, excellent for market stalls and pop-ups; the free card reader makes it a natural first POS for new businesses
• Lightspeed — best for cafés and restaurants; strong table management and kitchen display features
• Epos Now — popular with small restaurants and takeaways; good UK support
• SumUp — very low-cost card reader (no monthly fee on the basic plan); ideal for low-volume sellers

Accounting software

Accounting software handles your invoices, bank reconciliation, payroll and VAT returns. For UK food businesses, HMRC's Making Tax Digital (MTD) initiative means you are now legally required to keep digital VAT records and submit via compatible software if your taxable turnover exceeds the VAT threshold (currently £90,000).

Even below the MTD threshold, accounting software saves significant time versus manual bookkeeping and makes year-end easier for your accountant.

Options used by UK food businesses

• Xero — most popular choice among UK food businesses; integrates with Square, Lightspeed, and many other POS systems; strong bank feed connections
• QuickBooks — close competitor to Xero; good if your accountant already uses it
• FreeAgent — popular with sole traders and small limited companies; often available free through business bank accounts (NatWest, RBS, Mettle)

One important distinction: accounting software tells you whether your business is profitable overall. It does not tell you whether individual products are profitable. For per-product margin analysis, you need recipe costing software — they solve different problems.

Food safety and HACCP software

Digital food safety software replaces paper forms for temperature logs, cleaning schedules, supplier delivery checks and HACCP documentation. For any food business in England, Scotland or Wales, having a documented food safety management system is a legal requirement — and EHOs (Environmental Health Officers) increasingly expect to see digital records rather than paper folders.

Digital records are harder to lose, easier to audit, and make inspection prep significantly faster. If you receive a food safety complaint, timestamped digital records are your primary protection.

Options to consider

• FoodCore Core (£55/month) — includes recipe management, allergen labelling, and food safety logs in one platform; designed for small UK food businesses
• Navitas Safety — specialist food safety platform used by larger businesses and care settings
• Trail App — operations checklist tool used by hospitality businesses; covers cleaning and opening/closing checks

For a full guide on HACCP for small food businesses, see our article on creating a HACCP plan for a small food business.

Staff scheduling software

Once you have more than one or two members of staff, managing rotas manually becomes error-prone and time-consuming. Scheduling software lets you plan shifts visually, track labour costs against revenue, and manage leave and availability. It also helps with Working Time Directive compliance — a legal requirement for all UK employers.

Popular options

• Deputy — widely used in hospitality; strong shift templates, good mobile app for staff; from £2.50/user/month
• Rotaready — UK-focused; good for hospitality and retail; tracks labour cost as a percentage of revenue in real time
• 7shifts — popular in the US but gaining UK traction; restaurant-focused features; free plan available for very small teams

If you're a solo operator or working with occasional helpers, you likely don't need dedicated scheduling software yet — a shared Google calendar or WhatsApp group will do. But once you hit 5+ staff on regular rotas, the time savings justify the cost.

What software do small bakeries and home bakers actually need?

Stripped back to the essentials, here's what a home baker or small bakery actually needs to trade compliantly and profitably:

• Recipe management + costing + allergen labelling — FoodCore Essentials at £19/month covers all three in one platform. This is the non-negotiable layer: without it you're either guessing your costs or risking Natasha's Law non-compliance.
• Accounting — FreeAgent (often free through business bank accounts) or Xero (from £14/month on introductory pricing). You need to track income and expenses from day one.
• Card payments — Square or SumUp. Square's free card reader and zero monthly fee make it the obvious starting point for market stalls and pop-ups.

That's the complete stack for most small food businesses — and it can cost under £50/month (or less if FreeAgent is free through your bank account).

What software is free to use?

Let's be honest about the free tools available:

• Square POS — genuinely free basic plan with no monthly fee; you only pay transaction fees
• Google Sheets — can be used for manual recipe costing, but requires significant setup and manual maintenance
• Canva — can be used for basic label design, but has no allergen compliance features or automatic ingredient list generation

The problem with relying entirely on free tools is twofold. First, no allergen compliance: Canva won't tell you if your label is missing a required allergen, and Google Sheets won't flag cross-contamination risks. Second, no automatic updates: if a supplier changes an ingredient in a product you use, your spreadsheet doesn't update — your FoodCore recipe does.

For any food business selling products commercially, purpose-built software pays for itself quickly in time saved and compliance risk avoided. A single Improvement Notice from an EHO, or a social media complaint about missing allergen information, will cost you far more than a year's subscription.

Software stack for a small food business: cost summary

Most home bakers and small food producers only need the first three rows — recipe management, accounting, and payments. That's a complete, compliant setup for around £38/month (or as little as £19/month if FreeAgent is free through your bank).