About

Recipe, allergen and labelling software
for small food businesses.

It handles the parts of running a food business that nobody gets into food to do.

The jobs nobody gets into food to do

Keeping recipes and costings straight when a supplier changes a spec. Tracing all 14 allergens through every ingredient, every sub-recipe and every batch. Printing PPDS labels that stand up to Natasha’s Law. Logging your food safety checks somewhere you can actually find them again. Knowing what stock you’re holding and what needs making this week.

✓ Recipes and costings that update when a supplier price or spec changes
✓ All 14 allergens traced through ingredients, sub-recipes and batches
✓ PPDS labels generated from the recipe, not retyped
✓ Food safety checks logged where you can find them again
✓ Stock on hand, and what needs making this week

Who it’s for

Built for the awkward middle

Too much going on for a spreadsheet. Nowhere near enough scale to justify an enterprise system.

🍞

The home bakery

Whose wholesale orders have quietly outgrown a notebook.

🍽

The caterer

Doing 200 covers on a Saturday.

🏨

The market trader

Who has just been asked for a full ingredient breakdown by a new stockist.

That gap is the whole reason FoodCore exists.

Why it exists

A good law, and a tooling gap

Since October 2021, food that’s prepacked for direct sale in the UK has needed a label carrying the product name and a full ingredient list, with allergens emphasised. It’s a genuinely good law.

It also landed on thousands of small producers who had no software, no technical team and no budget for either — and the tooling on offer was priced for companies several sizes up.

So FoodCore is deliberately built the other way round. Enter your ingredients once, with their allergen data. Build recipes from them, including recipes inside other recipes. The allergen picture updates itself as you go, and your labels come off the back of it rather than being retyped by hand every time something changes.

Ingrediententered once, with allergens

→

Recipeand recipes inside recipes

→

Labelgenerated, never retyped

Change a supplier ingredient and everything downstream reflects it, which is the bit spreadsheets have never been able to do safely.

Alongside that sits costing, stock, production planning and food safety records — the operational spine of a small food business, in one place, priced so that using it doesn’t become the thing you’re worrying about.

What FoodCore isn’t

It isn’t an enterprise ERP, and it doesn’t try to be. There’s no six-week onboarding, no implementation fee, and no sales call before you’re allowed to look at it. You sign up, put a recipe in, and see whether it’s useful.

One thing worth saying plainly. FoodCore helps you produce accurate, consistent labels and keep your records in order, but the legal responsibility for what’s on your label stays with you. The software is there to make that responsibility far easier to carry — not to take it off your hands.

About me

I’m Dec, and I built FoodCore

Let’s be straight about the “us”. FoodCore is me.

Dec

Founder · developer · support desk

✉ ◎

My background is software development, project management and IT. I’ve spent my career building systems and getting them delivered — working out what people actually need, then making something that holds up once it’s in daily use rather than just demoing well.

FoodCore came out of frustration rather than a business plan. Spending time around small food businesses, I kept seeing the same thing. Talented people, good products, growing order books — and an operational setup held together by a spreadsheet, a folder of supplier PDFs and a lot of memory.

Then Natasha’s Law arrived and the requirements got sharper, but the options didn’t get better. You could stay on spreadsheets and hope you’d caught everything, or look at proper food software and find it priced at hundreds of pounds a month, built for manufacturers with an ops team. Neither is a real choice for a two-person bakery. One risks getting an allergen wrong. The other costs more than the business makes in a good week.

I looked at that gap for a while, waiting for someone to fill it, and eventually accepted that I already had the skills to fill it myself. So I did.

That’s the honest origin story. I’m not a chef and I’ve never claimed to be. What I know is how to build software that’s reliable, how to talk to the people using it, and how to keep asking whether a feature earns its place. The food knowledge comes from the people who use FoodCore — and a lot of what’s in the product now exists because a customer emailed me about something that was making their week harder.

What one person means, both ways

When you get in touch you’re talking to the person who wrote the code, tested it and markets it.

The advantages are real

✓ Bugs get fixed quickly — there’s no triage process between you and the fix
✓ Feature requests are read by the person who can build them
✓ No account manager, no upsell script
✓ No support tier that gets you a faster reply

The limits are real too

• I’m not answering emails at three in the morning
• Big changes take as long as they take
• If you need a supplier with a 24/7 helpline, FoodCore isn’t the right fit today — and I’d rather tell you now than take your money

What I do commit to: replying properly, telling you the truth about what the software can and can’t do, and not disappearing.

The company

FoodCore.io Ltd

FoodCore is run by FoodCore.io Ltd, a registered UK company, company number 17168660. I’m the named director on the Companies House record, which is public and free for anyone to check.

On the registered address: it’s a virtual office, and there’s no mystery to it. FoodCore runs from home on cloud infrastructure — there’s no warehouse and no reception desk to visit. Companies House publishes every UK company’s registered office address on a public register, so a home-run business is choosing between publishing its home address to the world or using a registered office service. I chose the second. It’s a normal and completely legitimate arrangement for a small business, and I’ve never presented it as anything other than what it is.

Facts about FoodCore

What it is	UK kitchen management software for small food businesses — recipe costing, Natasha’s Law labelling, allergen tracking.
Legal entity	FoodCore.io Ltd, registered in England & Wales
Company number	17168660
Founder & director	Dec Murphy
People	One. Founder, developer and support are the same person.
Founded	2024
Plans & pricing	Essentials £25/month or £250/year · Growth £40/month or £400/year · Core £65/month or £650/year. All prices include UK VAT.
Free trial	7 days, no card required
Compliance scope	Natasha’s Law / PPDS, Food Information Regulations 2014, all 14 UK allergens. US pages cover FALCPA and FDA Nutrition Facts.
Tenancy	Each customer gets their own private instance. Backups encrypted daily, on-site and off-site.
Country	United Kingdom. Prices in GBP, billed via Stripe.
Integrations	Stripe, Shopify, WooCommerce, Google Calendar (FoodCore Core)

Don’t take my word for it

1 Look up company 17168660 on the Companies House register → 2 Email me directly and see how quickly a real person replies → 3 Start a trial, put your own recipes in and judge the software on its own terms →

Where FoodCore is going

FoodCore is growing steadily with paying customers who use it every day, and the roadmap comes largely from what those customers ask for. It’s built to still be here in five years — which means growing at a pace one person can sustain, rather than promising things I can’t deliver.

If you’re weighing it up and something here doesn’t sit right, ask me. I’d rather have the awkward conversation than the misunderstanding.

Recipe, allergen and labelling softwarefor small food businesses.