~/openarch/work/kitchenledger-// case study

KitchenLedger

A multi-outlet food manufacturing and catering ERP. Live recipe costing, batch planning, and procurement tied directly to stock - replacing outlet-specific costing sheets with one shared runtime.

Saffron Bay Foods·food manufacturing · catering·2026·in production

openarch.in/work/kitchenledger

//the brief

What we built.

Saffron Bay ran several kitchens off disconnected spreadsheets. We built a system where every recipe costs itself from live ingredient prices, batches plan against par levels, and procurement, inventory and wastage all read from the same numbers across every outlet.

// Know what's on your shelf before it's gone.

domainfood ERP

shapemulti-outlet platform

statusin production

outlets4 · live

stack

reactdjango · drfpostgrescelery · redisqr scanning

//what we shipped

Recipe costing

Per-recipe ingredient breakdown with a live cost roll-up, and cost-per-serving derived automatically from yield.

Batch planner

A weekly production calendar per outlet - planned versus produced quantity, with variance flagged as it happens.

Procurement

Auto-suggested reorder lists from par levels and upcoming batches, with purchase orders and supplier lead-time tracking.

Inventory by outlet

Current stock per ingredient, per outlet, with low-stock and near-expiry badges reserved for genuine inventory state.

Wastage report

Logged wastage by ingredient, outlet and reason, rolled up to a weekly wastage-cost figure the kitchens actually see.

Compliance docs

FSSAI licence tracking per outlet, with expiry reminders surfaced before they lapse rather than after.

//data model

schema.sql5 tables

table ingredients

name, unit, category, avg_unit_cost

table recipes

name, outlet_id, yield_qty, yield_unit

table recipe_lines

recipe_id, ingredient_id, qty, unit

table batches

recipe_id, outlet_id, planned_qty, produced_qty, status

table wastage_logs

outlet_id, ingredient_id, qty, reason, logged_at

// batch status machine

01planned
02in_production
03completed / short_produced

//business logic

recipe-cost.tsLive recipe cost

function recipeCost(lines, unitCost) {
  return lines.reduce((total, line) =>
    total + line.qty * unitCost[line.ingredient_id], 0)
}
// costPerServing = recipeCost(...) / recipe.yield_qty

wastage-alert.tsWastage alert

function shouldAlert(wastageCost, procurementCost) {
  const ratio = wastageCost / procurementCost
  return ratio > 0.08  // alert past 8% of procurement spend
}

//on the roadmap

Honest edges.

→Validated multi-unit conversion (kg ↔ g, L ↔ ml) across every category
→Supplier lead-time folded into auto-reorder suggestions
→A fixed wastage-reason taxonomy to replace free-text tagging

//result

~⅓

wastage cost cut in two months

kitchens on one live stock

outlet-specific spreadsheets left

Saffron Bay cut ingredient wastage cost by roughly a third within the first two months, with all four kitchens working off the same live stock and recipe-cost numbers instead of outlet-specific spreadsheets.

all_work // next buildCarePathOne record, every clinic.