Built by a manufacturer who couldn't find software that fit.
So I built the one I wished I'd had.
Crown exists because the food safety tools available to small producers were either spreadsheets or enterprise platforms costing hundreds of dollars per month; there was no middle. So we built it, and now we're happy to offer it to other small businesses like ours.
The story behind the system.
I'm Nick Nemeth, founder of Bark & Bitter — a small-batch non-alcoholic spirits company licensed by the CFIA and registered with the FDA. We sell across Canada and into the US, and we run on the same food safety rules as a co-packer ten times our size.
At our scale, traditional compliance systems were way out of the budget. For five years I tried to keep up with batch logs, lot codes, recall plans, and PCP documents on spreadsheets, binders, and Google Docs. It worked until it didn't, and the night before my first CFIA inspection call, I was up at 2 a.m. cross-referencing receipts and batches by hand.
Crown QMS is what I wished I'd had that night. It's the system I now use to run Bark & Bitter — every batch, every lot, every program. Inspectors see exactly what I see.
How we build, and what we won't do.
No enterprise pricing.
$19 for Core, $29 for Pro. We won't price-anchor against the industry, and we won't add “Enterprise — call for quote” tiers. If we can't make the math work at this price, that's our problem to solve.
Used every day, by us.
Crown runs Bark & Bitter every day. Every feature you see has been used in production, by an actual manufacturer, before it reached you. We don't ship what we wouldn't use ourselves.
Plain language, not regulatory.
We translate the SFCR and FSMA into language a kitchen runs on. If an inspector wouldn't accept it, we don't write it. If a maker can't read it, we rewrite it.
A category that didn't exist.
The “small food manufacturer” category — hot sauces, condiments, honey, preserves, ferments, non-alcoholic beverages — is one of the fastest-growing in North America. Most of these operators run on spreadsheets and goodwill, because the alternative was a $400/month subscription to a tool built for an industrial co-packer, and few options existed for the “little guy”.
Our bet is that the right software for this category looks nothing like the existing enterprise stack. It's faster, much simpler, and priced so signing up is a coffee a week, not half of your commercial lease.
We're building toward a world where being CFIA- or FDA-licensed is not the moment a small producer stops growing — it's the moment they unlock the credibility to grow further.