Back-Office Automation
Mendocino Soup Company
Back-office automation for a small food business running three channels from a single kitchen.
A soup company on the Mendocino Coast. Farmers markets, online orders, and a catering channel getting started. Christian makes organic, locally sourced soups and sells them across all three — and he's the cook, the buyer, the bookkeeper, and the person at the stall. Pricing was guesswork. Every spreadsheet was behind. No clear picture of what anything cost to run. The work of understanding the business competed with the work of running it.
The problem
Without knowing what each soup actually costs to make, pricing is intuition at best. Without margin clarity across products, you end up pushing the things you like making rather than the ones the business needs you to sell. Without a consolidated view of revenue across channels, a busy month and a good month look identical. The tools that existed weren't built for someone running a market tent on the Mendocino Coast.
What we built
A single, private web app — Soup Studio — that replaced every spreadsheet and connected every part of the operation. Photograph a receipt and AI captures every line item. Ingredients flow into recipe costs, costs into suggested pricing, sales into a live P&L. Cash, Venmo, and Squarespace all roll up in one place. Before each market, the app generates a shopping list from the planned menu and an AI prep timeline based on batch sizes and complexity. After the event, revenue is in the dashboard before the drive home is over.
Then the kitchen got smarter
Once the financial picture was solid, we kept building. Recipes now live inside the app — paste from anywhere, upload a photo, or drop in a URL and the recipe is parsed, costed, and ready to scale. Rename it and the linked soup updates with it.
The kitchen has its own inventory system too. Receipts post quantities to a running ledger, par levels flag what's getting low, and the shopping list for each market now knows what's already in the pantry — "buy two pounds" or "covered." A physical count that drifts from the ledger gets reconciled in one tap.
When Christian brings someone on to help, they get an invite link, set a password, and land in the app as staff — read access to the kitchen, the ability to log their own hours. A built-in chat assistant answers questions about how anything works.
What changed
Christian now knows which products are strong enough to anchor an event and which ones need attention — not by feel, by the numbers. For a one-person operation, labor cost relative to revenue is the number that matters most. It's visible now. Market prep that used to take hours of planning now starts with a button — time that used to go into logistics goes into cooking instead.
What's still being built
Soup Studio grows with the business. On the roadmap: a post-event close-out flow to track what sold versus what was wasted, a break-even progress tracker, and a permit calendar so no market deadline gets missed. We stay on as partners, not vendors who hand off a product and disappear.
“Less time in the books. More time in the kitchen.”
Soup Studio is live at ops.mendosoupco.com