Meez CulinaryOS

Meez CulinaryOS provides a specialized recipe management platform tailored for culinary professionals, including chefs, restaurant operators, and multi-unit hospitality groups. The company operates on a software-as-a-service (SaaS) business model, generating revenue through tiered subscription plans that cater to different team sizes and feature requirements, including a free version with core features.

The initial idea for Meez was sparked in 2003 when co-founder and CEO Josh Sharkey, then a young chef, lost a notebook filled with invaluable recipes and techniques. This experience planted the seed for a digital solution to safeguard and organize culinary intellectual property. Sharkey, a chef with over two decades of experience in Michelin-starred restaurants like Oceana, Tabla, and Bouley, and as an operator who founded Bark Hot Dogs, brought a deep understanding of kitchen workflows to the company's development. He teamed up with CTO and Co-founder Marylee Rosenwald, who has led product development since January 2020, drawing on her experience from leading R&D at Maisonette and front-end development at Oracle. The platform underwent two years of development before its public launch in late 2020.

The Meez platform functions as a culinary operating system, centralizing the entire recipe workflow. It allows users to document, organize, and search for every recipe in a central hub. A key feature is its dynamic recipe costing, which accounts for prep yields, unit of measure conversions, and prep loss for over 2,500 ingredients to provide precise food costs in real-time. The system facilitates accurate recipe scaling, converting units of measure automatically to ensure consistency whether cooking for a few or several hundred. It also serves as a training tool, standardizing recipes with detailed instructions, photos, and videos to reduce onboarding time for new staff. Additional functionalities include inventory management, automated nutrition and allergen information, menu engineering to analyze profitability, and integrations with AP automation and accounting systems.

Significant milestones include a $6.5 million seed round in late 2021 and an $11.5 million Series A round in mid-2022, led by Craft Ventures, to accelerate product development and team expansion. The company fosters a remote work environment, with team members across the Americas. Keywords: recipe management software, culinary operating system, food costing, menu engineering, restaurant technology, kitchen management, recipe scaling, professional chefs, hospitality technology, inventory management, SaaS, food service, recipe database, allergen tracking, culinary training, Josh Sharkey, food tech, back of house operations, restaurant profitability, kitchen workflow automation