About SafePlate
I've spent more than a decade managing UK restaurants — front of house and back of house, independent kitchens and group venues, busy services and quiet ones.
From the founder
Founder & CEO, SafePlate
Allergens are not an abstract policy question for people who do this job. They are the moment when a server with a tray in one hand and a card reader in the other is asked, by a customer they have never met, whether the dish on the table is safe to eat.
The honest answer, in most kitchens I have worked in, is that the server is doing their best from memory. They have been trained. They have read the allergen matrix in the back office. They probably know who in the kitchen to ask if they are unsure. But under pressure, in the middle of a Friday service, with five other tables waiting, the system relies on someone remembering the right thing at the right moment — and it relies on every starter on every shift remembering it forever.
I have watched this fail. Not in the headline cases that make the news, although those are the ones that should keep the industry awake at night. I mean the small, near-miss versions: the dish that came out with the wrong garnish; the kitchen that swapped a supplier and forgot to update the matrix; the apprentice who said "yes, fine" because they did not feel comfortable saying "I don't know." Most of these end with no harm done. Some of them end in a hospital.
SafePlate exists because allergen safety is too important to leave to staff memory.
I started SafePlate because I believe the failure I have watched for a decade is solvable — and because the technology has finally caught up with the problem. POS APIs that didn't exist five years ago now do. Cloud infrastructure has matured. The cost of building a focused, operator-first allergen platform is finally within reach of someone who has lived the problem.
What was missing was somebody who had worked the floor, who knew what an allergen workflow that survives a Friday service actually looks like, and who could build the product around that reality rather than around what is convenient for software developers.
I am that person.
The company
I am the sole founder and director. I have not been introduced to the venture by any third-party investment-matching service.
Five interconnected applications, 157,000 lines of hand-written code, dual EPOS integration. Built on contract by a senior full-stack developer with full IP assignment to SafePlate Ltd.
Independent operators in my professional network. Pilots run free for six months in exchange for usage data and a public reference.
I am putting in £50k of my own capital at incorporation. A £250,000 SEIS-eligible seed round is planned to close against pilot operating data in Q3 2026.
SafePlate is the venture I am being assessed against. Endorsement materials available on request.
How we work
Every product decision starts from the question "what does this look like during a 7pm Friday rush?" If the answer is bad, we change the design.
Reference tools have existed for years. They have not solved the problem. We make the safe choice the easy choice — and the unsafe choice impossible by default.
SafePlate is not a recipe-management tool, not a stock system, not a kitchen-printer driver. It does one thing — allergen enforcement — and does it properly.
Talk to me directly
I read every email that comes through hello@safe-plate.io. Pilot enquiries are routed to me first.