Our Story
Built for the Kitchen.
Born from Loss.
ChefLife exists because a mentor-based kitchen has a fatal flaw — and we found out the hard way.
Memphis Fire Barbeque Company
The Kitchen We Built
Fifteen years running Memphis Fire Barbeque Company. And long before ChefLife existed as software, the core of it existed as a spreadsheet — four workbooks, forty-eight pages, hand-built in Excel over years of running a real kitchen. Food cost tracking, recipe costing, invoice management, vendor price history. It worked. Memphis Fire ran on it. We knew our numbers because of it.
But it was ours. Bespoke to our operation, maintained by the person who built it, opaque to anyone who hadn't grown up with it. Excel wizardry doesn't transfer. It doesn't help the chef in the next city who's flying blind on food cost. It doesn't survive a personnel change. It doesn't scale.
We also ran the way kitchens are supposed to run — on conversation. Chef to cook. Cook to prep. Voice to voice, hand over hand. We were proud of that. There's something right about a kitchen that passes knowledge the old way — by showing, by teaching, by being present. It builds a team. It builds trust.
What we didn't fully understand was how fragile that model actually is.
Two and a half years ago
What We Lost
Josh Ronaldson was our Sous Chef. He'd been with us for seven years — long enough to know Memphis Fire the way only someone who's lived it can know it. He knew which vendors we trusted and why. He knew the recipe adjustments we'd made over years of service and why they mattered. He knew how to train a morning prep team, how to run a high-volume Saturday, how to handle a supplier who'd shorted us and wouldn't admit it.
He was the kind of chef who made the kitchen smarter just by being in it. The kind of person you don't realize you depend on until you can't.
We lost Josh to a brain aneurysm. He was in the middle of a career that had a long way to run.
And all of that knowledge — seven years of it — went with him overnight.
The Aftermath
What We Understood
In the days after, the kitchen still had to run. Deliveries still came. Prep still needed to happen. Service still had to go out. And in that terrible, practical way that grief sometimes forces clarity, we understood something we'd never had to articulate before.
A conversational kitchen is a beautiful thing. It builds people. It builds culture. But it stores everything it knows in the people themselves — and when someone leaves, they take it with them. Not out of negligence. Not out of selfishness. Just because that's how it works. The knowledge lives in the person, and then it doesn't.
The spreadsheet had the food cost numbers. It had the recipe yields and the vendor prices and the invoice history. What it didn't have — what no spreadsheet can have — was why Josh made the calls he made. The vendor he'd dropped after one bad delivery and never gone back to. The recipe adjustments he'd refined through two years of service. The way he read a prep team and knew before anyone said anything that they were behind. That wasn't in any workbook. It was in him. We'd trusted that it always would be.
"We had the systems. We just didn't have a way to capture the people who ran them."
— Steve Popp, Memphis Fire Barbeque Company
The Mission
Why We Built ChefLife
The Excel system proved that the model works. Track invoices properly, version your recipes, watch your food cost in real time — it changes how a kitchen operates. Memphis Fire ran better because of it. That part we already knew.
What we needed to build was the version of that which any kitchen can use. Not forty-eight pages of Excel wizardry that lives on one person's laptop. A real system — one that a chef in any city can open on their phone at 6:30am when the truck arrives and actually use.
And one that captures more than numbers. Every recipe version, preserved so a change is never lost. Every vendor relationship documented so it survives a personnel change. Every allergen declaration signed and timestamped. Every policy acknowledged with a record that proves it was read. The judgment calls, the patterns, the institutional knowledge that makes a kitchen run — captured, not just in the people who hold it, but in the system itself.
We didn't build ChefLife to replace Josh. You can't replace a person. But you can build something that makes sure the next kitchen doesn't find out the hard way what they were carrying.
Our Mascot
JOSHI
The AI assistant at the heart of ChefLife is named JOSHI. It stands for Journey of Success in the Hospitality Industry.
But really, it's Josh.
Every time JOSHI learns a kitchen's patterns — the way vendors work, the prices an operation runs on, the recipes a team has built — he's doing what Josh did. Absorbing the knowledge of a kitchen and holding it for the people who need it.
He's in the name on every screen. In the system that learns and remembers. In the reason this exists at all.
Join the Waitlist
ChefLife is in development. If you run a kitchen and you recognize this problem, we'd like to hear from you.