We're on a mission to make costing effortless.

CostFoundry didn't start as software. It started as a set of product build sheets in Excel, and evolved into a complete costing and material tracking system.

In my almost two decades of experience in the food industry, I've learned that costing a product goes far beyond the recipe itself. Food businesses operate in very different ways, which means the costs that matter — and the way each business makes a profit — vary too.

Ingredients, labor, packaging, self-distribution costs, distributor markups — they're all constantly changing. And I've also learned that a surprising number of businesses aren't consistently tracking or accounting for many of them.

Let's face it: it's a lot to track, and it isn't always easy or self-explanatory.

So, to solve what had become an everyday problem for me — working with businesses that sometimes literally calculated and kept costs in someone's head — I started building spreadsheets to handle it all.

I spent about six months learning Excel top to bottom so I could make it work, creating scaling spreadsheets and eventually complete costing systems. But the more those spreadsheets had to do, the harder they became to maintain and hand off to people who didn't use them regularly. And as each business evolved, I couldn't keep up with all of it on my own.

What really inspired me to work toward a complete system was, actually, build sheets.

After starting a job as Plant Manager at a food manufacturing facility, I spent months asking at least five different managers — people who had worked there for years — what went into certain products and how much. No two managers ever gave me the same answer.

When I asked the head of operations how costs were calculated, or how quality information was maintained, there wasn't really a clear answer there either.

These things may seem like small details to some, but they're the soul of our products — and, by extension, our businesses.

What goes into each product, and how much? Which packaging is used? Are supplier item numbers assigned so we can maintain consistent formulas as staff changes? Is there somewhere we can quickly reference allergens when a customer asks?

Once we created a single build sheet, suddenly we knew exactly which materials went into the product, in what quantities, which allergens were present, and enough purchasing detail that anyone could order the correct materials — or even make the product itself.

Then I realized what I was really solving for: transferability.

Operational knowledge shouldn't disappear because the person who built the system isn't there, or because the person who normally places the orders is on vacation. Those are real operational problems. They affect product consistency, efficiency, and profitability.

Then came the next realization: once the build sheets existed, we already had all the components. Add the cost of each one, and you have almost everything you need to understand the real cost of a product.

From there, it just kept growing. I would run into the next problem, solve it, and realize that piece belonged in the system too.

That's eventually what became — and is still becoming — CostFoundry: software built from real food-industry problems, with the goal of making those operations easier to understand, easier to manage, and easier to pass on to the next person.