Founder of Stokd, Joseph Stock, reveals the importance of functional cost management software in the fast-paced café industry.
If you’ve ever placed an order for a café, restaurant, or venue, you’ll know the chaos well: one supplier takes text orders, another wants them emailed, and a third runs through their own app. Then come the invoices — buried in inboxes, misaligned with what was actually delivered, and often more confusing than helpful.
As someone who still runs hospitality venues, I built Stokd not because the market needed another system — but because we were wasting hours every week trying to work around broken ones.
The hidden cost of chaos
Hospitality operators already work in a high-pressure, low-margin environment. Add in manual ordering, disconnected communications, and chasing down invoice trails — and the compounding cost becomes huge.
What most operators don’t see clearly is the cost of not knowing. What was ordered versus what arrived? What’s been paid for? Where are the margins leaking? This isn’t about finding the cheapest price — it’s about having clear cost analysis across every product, supplier, and order — and being able to act on it.
Built for the real world, not just software demos
Stokd was never about being flashy — it’s about functionality that actually works in a real venue.
- Multi-supplier ordering in one clean flow
- Auto-generated tax invoices based on confirmed weights, quantities, and dispatch
- Clear cost breakdowns for every order
- Seamless sync with Xero, MYOB, or QuickBooks
- Trade terms or instant card payments built in
- Supplier-side logic that reduces admin, not increases it
Simplicity within complexity
The engine behind hospitality is complex — suppliers have pack sizes, random weight products, variable pricing. Venues have stock levels, menu margins, team turnover. Stokd’s philosophy is simple: don’t simplify the problem — simplify the process.
We embrace the complexity under the hood, but strip it away from the user experience. That’s the difference.
A platform, not a middleman
We’re not trying to be a marketplace or a gatekeeper. Stokd is an infrastructure layer — a clean pipeline between buyer and supplier, where everything from product availability to cost analysis to invoice reconciliation just works.
Suppliers maintain control of their data, pricing, and fulfilment logic. Venues gain visibility, speed, and clarity. Everyone saves time.
Born from the back-of-house
Stokd isn’t a venture studio project or investor-backed guesswork — it came from the same spreadsheets, fridge scribbles, and supplier WhatsApps that every venue knows too well.
Our recent launch at the Melbourne Foodservice Show was a strong validation of what we’ve built — not just from operators, but from suppliers who’ve long wanted better systems without more admin.
We’re not here to change the industry with hype — we’re here to fix what wastes its time.
Original article produced by Stokd Founder, Joseph Stock.
