Kitchen and hiring tools for a busy Birmingham pub

The brief

The Plough on Harborne High Street is a high-volume pub kitchen with a reputation to protect and a small management team. The owners wanted the kind of tooling larger groups take for granted, built around how their kitchen actually works rather than a generic hospitality package.

What we built

• Workstyle Checker: a web-based employee conation assessment used in hiring and team planning, so managers can see how a candidate prefers to work before they are on the rota.
• Menu Sense Checker: a tool that reads a draft menu against the kitchen's own station and cook-time data and flags where a service would bottleneck, so menus are tested on paper before they are tested on a Saturday night.
• Competitor monitor: a dashboard that watches the menu and website pages of the pub's local competitors on a schedule and shows what changed, replacing a job nobody had time to do by hand.
• Recipe and ingredient database: the kitchen's ingredient export turned into a structured recipe database that produces costing and allergen documentation, the pilot for the hospitality SaaS we now offer to other operators.

How it runs

Each tool was scoped, built and handed over as a working piece rather than a roadmap, starting with the Workstyle Checker in November 2025 and the menu and monitoring tools in early 2026. The team uses them directly; there is nothing to install and nothing to maintain on their side.

Outcome

A single-site pub now has hiring, menu-planning and market-watching tools built for its own kitchen. The recipe database work became the foundation of our menu-intelligence product for restaurant and pub operators.