FoodWeb ROA vs Fermentation Lab

ROA is the operating system for professional kitchens. Recipes in notebooks. Inventory in someone's head. Prep on a whiteboard that gets wiped at the end of every shift. Professional kitchens run on tribal knowledge — and when one chef calls out, the whole system breaks. ROA cuts through the chaos. One connected platform for recipes, inventory, prep planning, and team workflows — built specifically for the back of house. WHAT YOU CAN DO WITH ROA • Digitize Any Recipe Instantly Take a photo of a handwritten card, a PDF, or a printed sheet. ROA's AI parses ingredients, quantities, units, and instructions — then standardizes everything to your kitchen's spec. • Real-Time Inventory Track what's actually in your walk-in, dry store, and freezer. Stop guessing. Stop overstocking. Stop running out mid-service. • Recipe Costing & Yield Control Every recipe is linked to live ingredient pricing. See your food cost the moment a supplier price moves. • Menus That Stay In Sync Build menus from your recipe library. Update once, propagate everywhere — across sections, services, and sites. • Prep & Task Management Assign prep, track progress, hand off cleanly between shifts. No more "I thought you did it." • Ask ROA A kitchen-aware assistant that knows your recipes, your inventory, and your team. Ask in plain language; get answers in seconds. BUILT FOR PROFESSIONAL KITCHENS ROA is used by independent restaurants, multi-site groups, hotels, catering operations, and institutional kitchens. Designed with chefs from day one — not a generic productivity tool retrofitted for hospitality. WHY ROA Margins in foodservice are 3–6%. Every percentage point lost to waste, stockouts, or inconsistency is the difference between a kitchen that thrives and one that closes. ROA gives you visibility and control over the operations that move that margin. Stop running your kitchen from memory. Start running it from a single source of truth. — FoodWeb AI

Fermentation Lab is the cellar notebook for people who ferment at home. Pick a ferment and a recipe: the app weighs the ingredients, tells you what to do each day and keeps track of temperature, pH and salt, jar by jar. Start from a recipe 95 recipes for 39 ferments – sauerkraut, kimchi, kombucha, kefir, yogurt, miso, shoyu, koji, tempeh, cured meats, cheese, vinegar, beer, wine, mead and more – plus bread recipes and pizza styles. Ingredients arrive already weighed and stay in proportion: change how much you make, or one line, and the rest follows. Next to each ingredient you see whether it is in your pantry; what is missing goes to the shopping list. Or write your own recipe and keep it for next time. The right step, every day Each type has its own care sheet: the phases, the task of each phase and the checkpoints – minimum salt, pH by the expected day, temperature limits, humidity, weight loss. Home follows what is fermenting and reminds you of today's task, with a notification when it is due. Short ferments such as bread, koji or yogurt are counted in hours. Log it, understand it Temperature, pH, gravity, notes and photos in one tap. Every reading is read for your ferment: whether it is within the limits of its care sheet, whether it is too early to tell, what counts besides that number. Measuring guides explain how to read pH and °Brix properly. You can connect an Inkbird Bluetooth sensor for temperature and humidity. Bread and pizza Baker's percentages on total flour, hydration, sourdough starter, biga and poolish. The method is part of the recipe: autolyse, folds, a night in the fridge, the pan. Doughs made in pieces are asked in pieces – four 250 g dough balls – and the step-by-step recipe has timers. The water temperature that brings the dough to the right temperature is one tap away from Home. The Laboratory Pantry and supplies, a shopping list with a barcode scanner, your cultures, the archive of finished ferments, statistics across batches, a calendar and timers. The Library Problems and doubts ("is it mold?"), techniques and microbes, with a search that reads inside the cards. Share An Instagram story or post with the jar's photo, log or recipe, plus a link to its web page. The Community Your profile is your lab: a jar for every ferment in progress. A weekly leaderboard, daily quests, culture swaps and a swap map. Others see only the types and progress of your lab – never names, notes or photos – and you can hide it. The Brigade, for kitchens A shared lab for kitchen teams: tickets on the rail, shift handovers, the week's HACCP checks, roles. And more Eight languages, a paper or cellar theme, and a predicted flavor profile and umami score (they are estimates). Fermentation Lab helps you keep count and not skip a check. Its values are the common ones of home fermentation: a number within limits says that number is within limits, not that a food is safe or ready. When in doubt, don't taste it.