Serve food, not software headaches.

“A Scarborough roti shop got a surprise DineSafe inspection and the health inspector asked for three months of fridge temperature logs. The owner spent 40 minutes flipping through a water-stained binder while customers watched.”

Toronto Public Health requires HACCP-compliant temperature monitoring for all food establishments. Most small restaurants still use paper logs that get lost, damaged, or filled in retroactively right before inspection day. A single missed log can drop your DineSafe green pass to a yellow conditional.

“A pho restaurant on Ossington Avenue in Toronto has a separate tablet for Uber Eats, Skip The Dishes, and DoorDash. During Friday dinner rush, an order came in on the Skip tablet that nobody noticed for 35 minutes because it was buried under a stack of takeout menus.”

Small restaurants pay 25 to 30% commission per order across multiple delivery platforms, each with its own device, menu system, and payout schedule. Orders get missed, menus go out of sync, and owners have no unified view of what is actually selling across channels.

“The owner of a brunch cafe in Hamilton spends every Sunday night texting 14 part-time staff individually to build next week's schedule. Last month two servers both thought they had the Victoria Day weekend off because the confirmation texts got mixed up.”

Food service has the highest staff turnover of any industry in Canada, and most small restaurants still build schedules in group chats or shared Google Sheets. Shift swaps happen over text with no paper trail, and nobody tracks whether the person covering actually has their Smart Serve certification.

“A Caribbean catering company in Brampton priced their jerk chicken platter at $14.99 for two years. When they finally sat down with receipts, the actual food cost per plate was $9.20, a 61% food cost ratio that was silently bleeding them dry.”

Most small food businesses set menu prices once and never recalculate as ingredient costs shift. With Canadian grocery inflation hitting certain staples hard, a dish that was profitable last year can become a loss leader without the owner ever realizing it.

“A bakery-cafe in Vaughan got flagged during a routine Toronto Public Health visit because two kitchen staff had food handler certificates that expired four months earlier. The owner assumed HR handled it when they were hired.”

Ontario requires at least one certified food handler on premises at all times, and many municipalities want all food-contact staff certified. Certificates expire every five years, and in high-turnover kitchens, tracking expiry dates across dozens of current and former employees is nearly impossible with spreadsheets alone.