Built for caterers, by caterers.

Hi, I'm Colin. I've been in catering for 12 years, and in restaurants (in nearly every capacity) since I started as a dishwasher for a small pizzeria at 14 years old. I reached a point in 2024 where I was tired of grinding the same things: manual data entry, creating calendar events, printing ridiculous amounts of order sheets, planning delivery routes by hand, etc. I tried existing options, but none did quite what I wanted, or they had AI integrated in every single part of the app. I've been doing web development as a hobby since my teens, so I decided to take a shot at building an app to tackle prep-sheets, and was floored to see how much time it saved us and how much it reduced errors.

Since then, I set off creating software to tackle as many of the tedious/error-prone things as possible:

• Prep, an app that generates prep-lists and labels, with smart notation and automatic quantity population.
• Calendar, an app that automatically grabs orders as they come in, regardless of platform, and adds them to our calendar.
• Invoicing, an app that manages our invoicing, inquiries, and estimates, so we don't have to tab in and out of 4+ pages and copy/paste a million things.

And now Dispatch, because I was tired of sitting at my laptop during the morning chaos with 15+ order sheets on my desk and 3+ Google Maps tabs open. Now we don't need to juggle a bunch of addresses and scrawl potentially unreliable routes on our whiteboard!

None of our apps use AI. Accuracy is absolutely vital in catering, so all of our automation was built using plain code and regex (in other words, math). AI can hallucinate, math cannot.

Questions? I read every email: colin@catero.app