Between February and October of 2025, I had several surgeries and a hospital stay. During that stretch, my partner Rachel and I had to make planning decisions for Off The Deck Hot Sauce — the fermented hot sauce brand we've been building out of Fargo since 2016.
The data we needed to make those decisions existed. It was buried inside the kind of master spreadsheet that a lot of small food and beverage producers end up with — one we'd been maintaining for years, one that had grown into something that took real time to get anything useful out of. Comparing production runs against sales numbers. Understanding which fermentations were failing and why. Pulling HACCP records together for an upcoming inspection. Every one of those questions meant digging.
The problem wasn't that we weren't keeping records. We were. The problem is the gap between keeping batch records and being able to use them — and when you're physically recovering and making decisions with a year of downstream consequences attached, that gap has real costs.
One product. A 16-month planning cycle.
One of our products requires a planning cycle of sixteen months. Making a smart decision about that product means looking at everything at once: our batch records, market conditions, expected growing conditions for the Red River Valley peppers we source. When any part of that picture is hard to access, uncertainty goes up. When I was exhausted and couldn't afford to spend hours reconstructing a picture that should have been obvious, the friction had real costs.
I started looking for software that could help. First problem: I didn't know what to call it. Manufacturing Resource Planning — MRP — is not a term that comes up naturally in the world of small craft food production. It took real searching before I understood what I was even looking for.
What I found didn't fit. Most of the tools I encountered were enterprise software scaled down to reach smaller customers. They were built for industries that looked nothing like fermented foods. A lacto-fermentation operation with multiple culture lines, variable fermentation timelines, and ingredient lots tied to specific harvests doesn't map cleanly onto a generic manufacturing template. Nothing handled the kind of batch traceability and HACCP record keeping that small food producers actually need. Everything required hacking things together to make it work.
The cost gap between what was available and what it would take to build something was significant enough that building made sense.
So between November of 2025 and May of 2026, I built a version for just us. What I built eventually became FourFoxes — a batch traceability and quality management platform built for small food and beverage producers.
The inspection that changed the question
Annual inspections at Off The Deck Hot Sauce mean pulling HACCP records — calibration logs, pH records, batch documentation — for whichever inspector shows up. We've worked with several different inspectors over the years, and those of us in the industry know that the first inspection with a new inspector is usually the hardest. That's just how it goes.
This inspection was a first-time inspector. I pulled our calibration and pH records and emailed them to her on the spot, right while she was standing there.
She said: "There are a lot of people who need this. This makes my job a lot easier."
It was the smoothest inspection we'd had. That comment stayed with me.
What other small producers said
I started talking to people I knew — other fermented food makers, hot sauce producers, vanilla extract makers. The question they all asked was the same one: would software actually support their process, or would they end up bodging it together to make it fit? What they wanted was batch traceability software that handled their actual workflow, not a generic MRP modified to fit.
That question shaped what FourFoxes became. I learned as much as I could about as many CPG food production processes as possible, then rearchitected the platform to handle them natively — out of the box, not after a configuration project. I also realized that inventory management was a universal pain point for small food and beverage producers. Everyone was solving it with a patchwork of disconnected tools and methods.
The thing that really brought the architecture into focus was realizing how different the processes were, even within the same category. Producers with multiple product lines often had completely different workflows for each one. FourFoxes had to be flexible enough to handle that variety without requiring anyone to force their process into a template that wasn't built for them.
Why it exists
Off The Deck Hot Sauce is still a customer. The problems that started this — records that were hard to query, planning decisions made under uncertainty, a spreadsheet that couldn't answer a simple compliance question without an hour of work — those are the same problems FourFoxes solves for small food and beverage producers today.
If you're running a small food or beverage operation and any of that sounds like your week, that's who we built this for.
FourFoxes is a batch traceability and quality management platform built for small food and beverage producers. It replaces spreadsheet-based batch records with audit-ready traceability, HACCP record keeping, and lot-level tracking — without enterprise overhead.
Frequently asked questions
What is batch traceability software for small food producers?
Batch traceability software tracks every ingredient lot, production batch, and finished product through your operation, so you can answer questions like which batches used lot #X in seconds instead of hours. For small food and beverage producers, the right tool handles HACCP record keeping, supplier and lot tracking, and audit-ready documentation without requiring enterprise IT setup. That's what FourFoxes was built to do.
Why aren't spreadsheets enough for batch records?
Spreadsheets work when you have one product, one batch a week, and one person tracking everything. They stop working when you're juggling multiple SKUs, multiple culture lines, ingredient lots tied to specific harvests, and inspections that require pulling records on demand. The gap between keeping records and being able to use them quickly is where spreadsheets fail — and where compliance risk and recall risk live.
How is FourFoxes different from a food MRP system?
Most food MRP systems are enterprise software scaled down to reach smaller customers, built for industries that don't look like fermented food, craft beverage, or specialty CPG production. FourFoxes was built from inside a small producer's operation, with the architectural flexibility to handle different processes per product line — not after a configuration project, out of the box.