I used to be the sucker with the spreadsheet.
Excel, a Saturday, and a prayer
I used to price every recipe at Presidential Brewing Company in Microsoft Excel. Not a cute little sheet. A long-form, nested, “please do not sort column B” monument to my own stubbornness. Batch sauces inside plates. Plates inside specials. Specials that called the sauce again like it owed them money. Getting those parent-and-child costs right was a personality test I kept failing on purpose.
When a case price moved, I did not “update the model.” I went hunting. Every formula that still thought chicken was last Tuesday’s number. Recalc spun. The dinner rush did not. And if I asked someone else to run the file, they smiled, they nodded, and they never opened it again. I was the only person allowed to touch cell G14. That is not a process. That is a hostage situation with gridlines.
"Capturing subrecipe costs in Excel was a pain in the neck, and my team was not capable of using the tool. MenuForge changed that. Goodbye spreadsheets."
Building what the workbook would not
I started MenuForge so a price change hits the ingredient once and every recipe that uses it tells the truth — without a weekend of nested math, without training a new hire on four-deep batch yields, and without waiting for Excel to finish thinking.
Through my consulting business, Legendary Success Academy, I work with restaurant and food service operators across the country. The line I hammer is the same one that killed my spreadsheet: you need to know the cost of everything you sell, down to the penny. Most operators don't. They guess. They round. They lose money on items they swear are profitable.
MenuForge is the tool I wished the workbook had been — live pack costs, recipes the team can actually open, and plate math that does not require the founder in the room.
Recipes living only in one person’s head is a different kind of sucker move. In 2022 my last kitchen employee walked out the same day, and the menu walked with him. Documenting the food matters. Costing it without a private spreadsheet matters more — because a recipe you cannot price is just a rumor with a plate.
Why AI?
When I started integrating AI into the platform, it wasn't to chase a trend. It was because I saw operators spending hours writing menu descriptions, manually looking up volume-to-weight conversions, and struggling to come up with new recipes that used the ingredients they already had on hand.
AI handles all of that now. Tell it what you want, dial in how much of your existing pantry to use, set a cost target, and let it generate a recipe — complete with ingredients, prep steps, and marketing copy. It saves hours every week, and the recipes are genuinely good.
The Book
The lessons behind MenuForge didn't start with software — they started with years of building, failing, rebuilding, and learning what actually works in this industry. I wrote all of it down in my book, Shifting Gears: The Ultimate Roadmap to Building Your Legendary Brewery or Restaurant.
It covers everything from concept and business planning to operations, staffing, cost control, and the mindset shifts that separate businesses that survive from businesses that thrive. If you're opening, growing, or turning around a food or beverage operation, this book was written for you.
What Drives Us
MenuForge exists because independent restaurants, breweries, and food businesses deserve the same recipe management tools that large chains take for granted — without the enterprise price tag or the six-month implementation timeline.
Whether you're a single-location brewpub or a growing multi-unit concept, your recipes are your business. MenuForge makes sure they're documented, costed, and accessible to your entire team.
Ready to fire the workbook?
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