We didn't read about this problem. We lived it.

Drew has spent his whole career in hospitality — and not just at home. Front of house and general manager across multiple sites (including Oliver's), but further afield too: working in kitchens and venues around the world, with a spell making cheese on Bruny Island, off the coast of Tasmania. Oliver ran Harbour Kitchen as owner and head chef — the kind of place where he was in at 6am, still there at midnight, and the entire menu lived in his head. Most recently he's been Executive Chef at ESS, part of the Compass Group — one of the UK's largest catering companies.

Between them, they've done nearly every job hospitality throws at you. And like anyone serious about their restaurant, they cared. Standards were high. The kitchen was clean. The team knew their stuff.

But allergen records? GP margins? Staff training sign-offs? That was a different story.

The EHO knock

You know the feeling. Unannounced. The inspector at the door. Your ring binder somewhere under a stack of invoices and a delivery note from last Tuesday.

Your kitchen is clean. Your team are trained. But in that moment, none of it counts if your paperwork doesn't back it up.

We felt that more than once. The stomach drop. The scramble. The relief — and then the quiet resolution: we need to sort this.

Five apps and still falling through the gaps

We tried to fix it the way most operators do. With software. One app for delivery checks. Another for staff onboarding and allergen training. A spreadsheet for GP. Something else for the menu. Change an ingredient price and you're doing the maths by hand.

Nothing talked to anything else. The more you patched it together, the more things slipped between the joins.

Sometimes the business would quietly lose money — not through any single failure, but through a price rise here, a portion drift there. And without sitting down with every piece of paper you owned, you couldn't see it until it hurt.

The thing we kept coming back to

Imagine if you never had to think about the paperwork again. Not because it didn't matter — because it was already done. Live, correctly, every day. So when the EHO walked in, you could look them in the eye and hand them everything. No scramble. No apology.

"If we could stop worrying about whether our records were up to date — we could focus entirely on the customer and the food. That's what we actually got into this for."

And what if your food costs, your GP, your menu — all of it was visible in one place? So you could make a decision at 4pm in the prep kitchen, not in a crisis meeting three weeks later.

That's what we wanted. That's what didn't exist. So we built it.

Built for independents. Only for independents.

HospoPilot isn't for chains. It isn't for groups with a compliance manager and a head of training. It's for the operator doing it themselves — with a small, stretched team — trying to run a great restaurant and stay on top of everything else at the same time.

We know what that feels like. We've been that person. And we built the tool we always needed.