The CaterEdge Story
CaterEdge Software is the culmination of and continuing process of consultation with hundreds of professional caterers for over 20 years, many of which are CaterEdge Software users.
CaterEdge was inspired 20 years ago by the catering industry’s need for a user friendly, comprehensive software program that would generate custom designed proposals, accurate job and recipe costing while providing a complete set of event management and sales tracking reports for both off premise and on premise caterers, large and small.
Why CaterEdge?
In 1989 Jeffrey Sweren teamed up with Steve Salzman, friends that grew up together in Baltimore, and started Business Solutions for the Mac in the San Francisco Bay Area. We were Macintosh computer consultants and did custom designed software development.
In 1990 we were contracted by a small gourmet deli and catering business to custom design a program that would accurately cost their catering events and maintain accurate recipe costing.
This required being able to accurately calculate the cost of products and ingredients used in recipes and proposals. We had to figure out how to accurately calculate costs regardless of the purchase measure and the unit measure in the recipe or order. We were able to create a conversions table that will calculate cost no matter the difference between the purchase cost measure and the quantity measure that is used in building your recipes and proposals.
Encouraged by their success, Jeffrey became familiar with the catering hospitality industry and found that there was no user friendly or comprehensive catering business software on the market and the need for affordable software designed specifically for caterers was an untapped market.
Jeffrey worked with several local caterers to determine what their needs were and what features were essential in a comprehensive, user friendly catering software program.
CaterEdge goes to market
Following three years of research and development, we introduced the then revolutionary catering software at the 1994 Special Events show in San Francisco and was meet with a lot of excitement.
We had modest success those first few years even though we had little or no real competition. The main reason at that time was due to the fact that CaterEdge was designed to run exclusively on Macintosh computers which at that time was a greatly limited and declining market.
CaterEdge goes cross platform
By 1999, in order to meet the needs of the vast majority of Windows based computers, we began redesigning CaterEdge to run cross platform on both MacOSX and Windows operating systems.
Jeffrey teamed up with Michel Malecot, owner of the French Gourmet Caterers in San Diego, California, and Daniel J. Layland, master FileMaker programmer and designer, to completely redesign CaterEdge and take CaterEdge “cross platform”.
Michel provided the financing along with his expertise and vast knowledge of the catering business to help Jeffrey and DJ, a master FileMaker programmer and designer, to redesigned CaterEdge using FileMaker Pro, the only cross platform development sotware on the market.
CaterEdge today
We have had much success since going cross platform and due to the tremendous increase of Macintosh computer market share. Today we are the oldest, most mature and only comprehensive catering business management software on the market that runs on MacOSX, WindowsOS, and on iPad, and iPhone and a web based option.
In addition to the most comprehensive and accurate costing of your events, CaterEdge manages your staffing and payroll, produces a comprehensive shopping list, scales your recipes for your kitchen prep and a slew of sales reports. Your proposal presentation is customized to your specifications and we provide 24/7 tech support.
CaterEdgre today has hundreds of users in over 5 countries running their business with CatrEdge Software.