FoodCore is kitchen management software UK small food businesses actually use — one system for recipe costing, allergen management, food labels, shopping lists, and order tracking. Everything you need to run your kitchen, from £55/mo.
7-day free trial · no card required · £55/mo after
Running a small food business means wearing every hat at once. You're the chef, the buyer, the compliance officer, and the bookkeeper. Most of the administrative work — costing recipes, checking allergens, generating labels, writing shopping lists — gets done in a patchwork of spreadsheets, Word documents, and notes apps. It works until it doesn't: until a supplier price change cascades through 20 recipes you haven't updated, or until a customer asks about allergens and you're not sure the spreadsheet is current.
Kitchen management software exists to solve this, but most of it is built for large catering operations or restaurant chains — with pricing and complexity to match. Systems like Kafoodle, Nutritics, and Lightspeed charge £100–£200/month and are designed for teams with dedicated admin staff. They're not built for a bakery owner who needs to cost a new recipe at 6am before the morning bake.
FoodCore is built specifically for small UK food businesses. It covers the core operational tasks — recipe costing, allergen tracking, food labelling, shopping lists, order management — in a single system that's straightforward to use without training. Two plans: Essentials from £19/month, Core from £55/month. No per-user fees.
The result is less time on admin and more time on the food. Customers who switch to FoodCore typically save 30–40 hours of admin time per month — time previously spent maintaining spreadsheets, manually checking allergens, and reformatting labels.
The economics are straightforward. At £55/month, FoodCore costs less than two hours of your time at minimum wage. If it saves you five hours of admin per week — a conservative estimate for a business managing 20+ recipes — it pays for itself many times over. And unlike spreadsheets, it doesn't break when you add a new product, change a supplier, or scale a recipe. It's a system that grows with your business rather than one you have to rebuild every time something changes.
One system. Two plans. No add-ons.
FoodCore calculates the cost per portion of every recipe based on your ingredient prices. Update a supplier price and every recipe that uses that ingredient recalculates automatically. See your food cost percentage and margin for every product.
Generate compliant PPDS labels directly from your recipes — full ingredients list in legal order, all 14 allergens highlighted in bold. Labels update automatically when recipes change.
FoodCore generates a shopping list from your production schedule — aggregated by supplier, with quantities calculated from your recipes. No more manually totalling up what you need to order.
Log customer orders, track what needs to be produced, and manage your production schedule. See what's due and what's been completed at a glance.
Track all 14 UK-required allergens across your entire recipe library. Generate an allergen matrix for your full menu — useful for customer queries, staff training, and compliance records.
See the cost, selling price, and margin for every product. Identify which items are most profitable and which are being sold below a sustainable margin — without building a spreadsheet.
FoodCore is the best kitchen management software UK small food businesses can access — built for real kitchens, not enterprise IT teams.
Bakeries have a unique relationship with recipe management: a product range that might include dozens of baked goods, each with its own ingredients, allergens, and cost profile. When flour prices rise, the cost of every product that uses flour changes. When a recipe is reformulated, the allergen information and label need to update too. Managing all of this manually — across spreadsheets and printed recipe cards — is one of the most common sources of admin burden for small bakeries.
FoodCore gives bakeries a single system where recipe costing, allergen tracking, and food labelling all connect. Update a supplier price and every recipe recalculates. Change an ingredient in a recipe and the allergen information and PPDS label update automatically. Generate a shopping list for your week's production in seconds. For a bakery producing pre-packed products for direct sale, Natasha's Law compliance is built in — labels are generated directly from recipes, with allergens highlighted in bold and ingredients listed in descending weight order. This is practical kitchen management software UK bakeries can use from day one, without a setup team or training programme.
Catering businesses operate on a job-by-job basis: each event has its own menu, guest count, allergen requirements, and shopping list. The operational challenge is managing this variability without the admin overhead spiralling out of control. Event caterers, wedding caterers, and corporate caterers all face the same core problem: pricing events accurately in advance, then delivering them profitably when ingredient costs may have changed.
FoodCore is the kitchen software for small food businesses that cater events. Your recipe library is the single source of truth: every recipe is costed from current ingredient prices, allergen-tracked at ingredient level, and ready to scale. When you log an event and select the dishes, FoodCore scales each recipe to the required portions, aggregates the shopping list by supplier, and generates an allergen matrix for the event. What previously took an hour of manual work takes minutes. Visit our dedicated catering management software page for a full breakdown of catering-specific features.
Meal prep and subscription box businesses have some of the most demanding operational requirements in the small food sector. Menus change weekly. Every product that ships needs a compliant food label. Recipes need to be scaled to batch sizes that vary based on subscriber numbers. And ingredient costs need to be tracked precisely so that pricing remains profitable as the business grows and supplier costs fluctuate.
FoodCore handles the complete meal prep workflow. Build your recipe library once; every recipe automatically has its cost per portion, allergen information, and ingredients list calculated. Each week, update or add the relevant recipes, set the batch sizes based on your subscriber count, and FoodCore generates the shopping list for the week — scaled automatically to the correct quantities. When it's time to print labels for the production run, FoodCore produces compliant PPDS labels directly from recipes, with the correct ingredients list and allergens highlighted. This is the kind of kitchen management system UK meal prep businesses need to operate at scale without a proportional increase in admin time.
Small restaurants and food service businesses need to know their food cost percentage for every dish on the menu. Menu engineering — the discipline of understanding which dishes are most profitable and using that information to guide pricing and menu design — starts with accurate recipe costing. Without it, you're pricing on instinct rather than data, which typically means some dishes are underpriced and eroding margin without you realising it.
FoodCore gives small restaurants a recipe costing and margin dashboard that works without any accounting or finance background. Enter your ingredients with purchase prices and pack sizes. Build your recipes with ingredient quantities. FoodCore calculates cost per portion, food cost percentage, and margin automatically. When you change a supplier or a price changes, costs update across every recipe that uses that ingredient. It's the accessible, affordable kitchen management software UK small food service businesses have been looking for — without the enterprise complexity or price tag.
Home food producers — whether selling at farmers' markets, through local shops, or direct to customers online — have the same legal obligations as larger food businesses when it comes to allergen information and food labelling. If you're producing pre-packed food for direct sale, Natasha's Law applies to your products. Getting allergen information wrong on a label is not just a regulatory risk; it can have serious consequences for customers with allergies.
FoodCore is affordable enough for a one-person home producer. At £19/month for the Essentials plan, you get recipe costing, allergen tracking, and compliant PPDS label generation — everything a home baker, jam maker, or small food producer needs to operate professionally and legally. There are no per-user fees and no minimum commitments. A 7-day free trial means you can test the system against your actual recipes before paying anything.
Why small food businesses switch from manual methods to FoodCore.
How does FoodCore compare to Kafoodle, Deputy, Lightspeed, and MarketMan for small UK food businesses? We're honest: FoodCore is positioned as the affordable, UK-focused option for small businesses — not a replacement for large enterprise systems.
Prices are approximate and subject to change. FoodCore pricing correct as of 2026. Deputy focuses primarily on staff scheduling and workforce management — it's a different product category.
Real feedback from bakeries, caterers, and meal prep businesses using FoodCore as their kitchen management system UK.
"I was spending Sunday evenings updating spreadsheets for Monday's bake. FoodCore replaced all of that — my recipes, allergen info, and labels are all in one place and always up to date. I can't believe I waited this long."
"Managing 60+ recipes for weekly events was chaos before FoodCore. Now our allergen information is always accurate and our labels print in seconds. It's transformed how we run our kitchen."
"We run a weekly meal prep service with changing menus. FoodCore handles the scaling, shopping lists, and labels automatically. What used to take half a day now takes 20 minutes."
Kitchen management software is a digital system that helps food businesses manage the core operational tasks of running a kitchen: recipe costing, allergen tracking, food labelling, shopping list generation, and order management. It replaces manual methods — spreadsheets, Word documents, and paper notes — with a connected system where data flows automatically between functions. FoodCore is kitchen management software UK small food businesses can use from day one, without a setup team or training programme.
Kitchen management software in the UK ranges from around £19/month for focused tools to £150–£300/month for enterprise platforms like Kafoodle, Lightspeed, or MarketMan. FoodCore offers two plans: Essentials from £19/month and Core from £55/month — both with all features included and no per-user fees. There's a 7-day free trial with no card required, making it the most accessible best kitchen management software UK 2026 option for small food businesses.
Recipe management software focuses specifically on storing, costing, and organising recipes. Kitchen management software is broader — it includes recipe management but adds operational tools like order tracking, shopping list generation, allergen compliance, and food labelling. FoodCore covers both: it's a complete kitchen management system UK with recipe management built in as a core component. See our recipe management software page for more detail on the recipe-specific features.
Yes. FoodCore generates Natasha's Law compliant PPDS labels directly from your recipes — full ingredients list in descending order by weight, with all 14 allergens highlighted in bold. Labels update automatically when recipes change, so you're never printing outdated information. This is one of the core reasons small food businesses choose FoodCore as their kitchen software for small food businesses.
Yes. FoodCore generates Natasha's Law compliant PPDS labels directly from your recipes — full ingredients list in descending order by weight, with all 14 allergens highlighted in bold. Labels update automatically when recipes change.
Yes. FoodCore is built for small food businesses. There are no minimum requirements or per-user fees. A one-person home bakery pays the same £55/month as a small catering company.
You enter your ingredients with their purchase price and pack size. FoodCore calculates the cost per gram/ml. When you add ingredients to a recipe with quantities, FoodCore calculates the total recipe cost and cost per portion automatically.
£55/month for the Core plan, which includes every feature. No add-ons, no feature tiers, no per-user fees. There's also an Essentials plan from £19/month. There's a 7-day free trial — no card required.
Yes. FoodCore is a web application that works on any device with a browser — desktop, tablet, or mobile. The barcode scanning feature for ingredient import works particularly well on mobile.
Explore FoodCore's full feature set and our guides for UK food businesses.
Every feature included. No card required. Cancel any time. from £19/mo after trial — two plans from £19/month.
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