A food safety plan builder for the person actually running the kitchen

The clearest way to understand the market is to notice who each product is actually sold to. Everything else follows from that.

ioni.ai describes itself as “AI Food Safety & Operations Software for Manufacturers”, built for “small and mid-size manufacturers, co-packers, and brands”. Its HACCP builder opens with “upload your existing SOPs and recipes”.

haccp.ai calls itself “The AI Workspace for Food Safety Consultants”, and is admirably direct about it: the workspace is “built around the consultant’s workflow, not around a single establishment”. Its headline is “HACCP plans, drafted by AI and signed by you” — where “you” is the consultant.

Neither is a criticism. They are good products built deliberately for their customer. But if you own one restaurant, you are not a mid-size manufacturer and you are not a consultant with forty clients, and a tool shaped for those people will feel heavy in your hands.

This is the difference that matters most and it is easy to miss on a feature list.

“Upload your existing SOPs and recipes” is a perfectly sensible starting point for a manufacturer, who has a quality department and a shelf of documented procedures. It is a strange request to make of a restaurant owner, because the documented procedures are precisely the thing they are trying to obtain.

HACCPlan starts from the opposite assumption: you have a kitchen and a menu and no paperwork at all. Photograph the menu and it reads the dishes. Then it asks about your equipment, your process and your people, and writes the SOPs for you.

There are 118 things a complete restaurant plan needs to know. Presented as a form, that is a wall nobody climbs.

Sage asks them one at a time, in plain English, and each question carries a line about why it matters. You can answer by voice or by typing. Nobody needs to know what a critical control point is to answer “do you cool anything down to use later?”

Along the way it teaches. People finish knowing why the cooling log has two time windows, not merely that it does — and that is the part that survives after the binder goes on the shelf.

No demo. No discovery call. No “request access”. You answer the questions and watch the plan assemble in front of you — the cover page with your business on it, the document index with every SOP and log listed by name and number, the first rows of your hazard analysis.

The wall is at the end, for the finished signable binder and the downloads. And you keep a complete printable document from it either way.

Seventeen special processes are screened at around the sixth question: sous vide, reduced-oxygen and vacuum packaging, curing, smoking for preservation, acidified sushi rice, juice, raw shellfish and others.

Tick one and the conversation stops right there — three minutes in, not an hour in, and long before any payment. You are offered a waitlist or a plan written by hand by Andrew instead.

Software that takes your money and then discovers it cannot finish is the thing this is designed to avoid.

The safety logic is not improvised by a language model. Thirty-four reviewed modules decide what applies to your operation, and every critical limit carries the Food Code section it came from.

Where an answer is missing, the document prints [needs answer: …] instead of plausible-sounding filler. Twenty-six deterministic checks decide when a plan is genuinely complete — not a model’s confidence score.

The plan is yours, under your name. You sign one exact revision — not a moving document — and every revision is stored with its own id and content hash.

When the menu changes, or a new cooler arrives, or the person in charge leaves, you tell it and the plan rebuilds. The old revision is archived rather than overwritten, and a signed plan that has drifted out of date with your answers is flagged rather than quietly left wrong.

If HACCPlan were right for everybody it would be built for nobody. Three cases where you should go elsewhere:

You manufacture or co-pack. If you are running production lines, lot codes, batch records and supplier documents at scale, ioni.ai is built for exactly that and HACCPlan is not. We removed our manufacturing pages rather than pretend otherwise.

You are a consultant with a book of clients. haccp.ai is built around multi-client workflow, publishes a system card with its own measured limits, and serves US, EU and GB frameworks in five languages. That is serious work and it is aimed at you, not at a single kitchen.

You need a special process signed off. Sous vide, ROP, curing, fermentation for safety — those need a process authority or a variance. No software replaces that, ours included.

United States only, for now. Plans are written to the FDA 2026 Food Code. A Canadian kitchen is stopped at the second question and offered the waitlist.

No special processes. See above — screened early, and it says so.

It is not a regulator’s approval. A finished plan is complete for the scope HACCPlan supports and ready for you to review, sign and submit. Your local health department can always require more, and the plan says so on its own pages.

Checkout is not open yet. You can build a complete plan today and nothing is charged until it is.