Kitchen Mobile
Designed for the Line.
Not the Office.
A kitchen management tool that requires leaving the floor is a tool that doesn't get used. ChefLife lives where kitchens actually work — in your apron pocket.
The Problem
Software Built for Desks. Kitchens Don't Have Desks.
Most restaurant management software is designed to be used sitting down. At a computer, on a network, with time to navigate menus and click through tabs. That might describe an office. It does not describe a kitchen.
A kitchen is a hallway with heat. It's noise, motion, and twelve things happening at once. The moment your software requires stepping away from the line to use it — opening a laptop in the back office, hunting for the iPad mounted by the walk-in, sitting down to enter last night's delivery — it has already failed. Tools that require ceremony don't get used. They get worked around.
The phone in your chef's apron pocket is the only computer that's already in the kitchen. ChefLife is built for that phone.
The Three Pillars
People. Place. Profit.
The mobile experience is three swipe pages. Not because we like carousels — because there are exactly three things a chef needs to know right now.
"If you don't have the people, you don't have a place for guests. No guests, no profit. Take care of 1 and 2 — 3 follows if you're not daft."— Steve Popp, Creator of ChefLife
People
Who's Here. Who's Ready.
The team schedule in your hand. Who's clocked in, who's on break, who's running late. Policy acknowledgments, coaching notes, and direct messaging — for when the manager is on the floor and needs to reach the prep station without shouting across the kitchen.
- Live team schedule and attendance
- Clock-in status and shift alerts
- Policy acknowledgment tracking
- Team messaging and coaching
Place
What's Happening in This Kitchen Right Now.
Temperature logs. Task checklists. Deliveries expected and deliveries received. The operational pulse of the kitchen — not a report from last Tuesday, but what's actually happening on the line in the next three hours.
- Temperature logs and HACCP compliance
- Opening, mid-shift, and closing checklists
- Incoming delivery schedule and alerts
- Inventory counts and spot checks
Profit
What Does Today Cost.
The financial picture, in your pocket. Invoice entry from the receiving dock. Inventory costs against par levels. Where you're tracking versus your food cost target. Not accounting — just the numbers you need to make decisions today.
- Quick invoice entry at the dock
- Food cost tracking vs. target
- Inventory value and par status
- Full admin access for managers
Swipe between pages. The dots are Newton's cradle — pull one end and the other moves.
Fast Entry
The Phone Is a Command Centre. Not a Scanner.
Every restaurant tech demo looks the same. A chef holds up a phone. Points it at an invoice. The app magically reads the numbers. The audience applauds. The demo ends before anyone asks what happens when the invoice is crinkled, when the lighting is bad, when the driver hand-wrote a substitution in the margin, or when the OCR gets forty percent of a two-hundred-line GFS invoice wrong and now you're correcting robot homework at 7am.
We built a prototype. We tested it on real invoices from real kitchens. We said no.
ChefLife's entry screen is optimized for speed, not spectacle. You open the vendor. You see their items — ChefLife already knows what you order from them. You confirm quantities and prices against a known baseline. The system flags anything that has moved.
Your history with that vendor is already there. Expected items, last prices, par quantities.
Type in what arrived and what was charged. ChefLife pre-populates the expected price. You're confirming, not transcribing.
Price moved from last order? Flagged. Item dramatically off market norms? Flagged harder. Shorts and substitutions get noted.
A 30-line invoice in four minutes. A 60-line invoice in seven. No retakes. No corrections. No gymnastics.
30-line invoice
60-line invoice
No photo gymnastics
When you're using OCR, your attention is on making the camera read the invoice correctly. When you're using fast entry, your attention is on the actual product in front of you — checking weights, checking condition, catching the shorts your driver will deny if you don't catch them now.
— Fast Entry, Not Photo Gymnastics
Delivery Verification
The Most Critical Mobile Moment.
The receiving dock at 6:30am is the only moment you have leverage. Once the truck pulls away, the shorts are yours. The substitutions are yours. The price changes are yours. ChefLife is designed for that moment.
Catch Shorts at the Dock
Ordered 40 lbs of brisket. 35 showed up. You have thirty seconds to catch that before the driver leaves. ChefLife shows expected quantities next to what you enter — the gap is visible immediately.
Flag Substitutions
Your vendor swapped out your usual produce supplier mid-route. The invoice shows it as the same item. It isn't. ChefLife's item history means an unfamiliar item code triggers a prompt, not a silent accept.
Catch Price Changes
Chicken thighs jumped $0.40 a pound since last week. ChefLife compares what you enter against the previous invoice price and the expected market range. Significant movement gets flagged before you sign off.
Cascade Updates Automatically
When the price is confirmed, ChefLife cascades the change to every recipe that uses that ingredient. Recipe costs update. Margin alerts fire where needed. Your desktop admin reflects reality by the time you get to it.
The Workflow
The Bar
If It Takes Longer Than a Notebook, We've Failed.
Paper works. Chefs have been running kitchens with clipboards and spiral notebooks for a hundred years. If ChefLife entry takes longer than writing it down by hand, there is no argument for using it. None.
That's the standard we hold every design decision to. Fewer taps. Better pre-population. Smarter flagging. Faster navigation between items. Not because it looks good in a demo — because there's a prep cook holding a phone with cold hands and a truck idling in the alley, and every unnecessary step is a step taken in the wrong direction.
The system should be faster than paper. If it's not, the system needs to change. Not the process. Not the chef. The system.
Role-Based Access
If You Can't Use It, You Don't See It.
No greyed-out buttons taunting line cooks. The mobile experience adapts to who's logged in. Every role sees exactly what it needs — and nothing it doesn't.
| Role | People | Place | Profit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Line Cook | My profile, my schedule | Temps, tasks, my station | — |
| Shift Lead | Full team view | Receive, checklists | Invoice entry, counts |
| Manager | All People + coaching | All Place + history | All Profit + admin |
Your phone is already in your apron pocket. That's where your kitchen management system should be too.
On AI Invoice Processing
We're Watching. We're Not Racing.
AI-powered invoice parsing has gotten genuinely better in the last two years. For predictable formats — the same vendor, the same layout, clean digital PDFs — it works well and will keep improving. We'll integrate it for that use case when it's reliable enough to trust without line-by-line verification.
For the full range of formats that real operators deal with — fax-quality scans, handwritten adjustments, non-standard layouts, multi-page PDFs from accounting software older than some of your cooks — the error rate is still too high to trust without human confirmation. And if you're confirming every line anyway, you haven't saved any time.
The right tool for each job. Fast entry for delivery verification, where presence matters. AI parsing for digital invoices where format is consistent. We'll never make you fight your phone to do basic data entry.
Built by someone who's been on the line.
ChefLife isn't designed in a conference room. It's designed around the moment a driver shows up at 6:30am and you have thirty seconds to check in the order before service prep starts.