GembaKitchen
GembaKitchen runs a professional kitchen's back of house: live stock, recipes with automatic food cost, menus and sales that deduct ingredients themselves, plus a Claude-powered assistant you can type or speak to in English or Bulgarian.
What is GembaKitchen?
GembaKitchen is a multi-tenant SaaS that runs the back of house of a restaurant, café or professional kitchen. Each business gets an isolated workspace in which it manages products and stock, recipes, menu, sales and reports — and every record is scoped to a restaurant identifier, so one kitchen can never see another's data.
Its point is that the four parts are genuinely linked rather than merely co-located. Selling a dish deducts that dish's recipe ingredients from stock, multiplied by quantity and written to an audit ledger, and books both the revenue and the cost. Recipes are built from the products you already track, so the food cost and margin of every dish are computed from real prices instead of guessed at. Reorder levels raise low-stock alerts before a shortage is discovered mid-service, and reports cover revenue, food-cost percentage, profit per dish, top sellers, low stock and waste over 7, 30 or 90 days.
On top of that sits the feature the product is named for: an assistant powered by Anthropic's Claude that both reads the kitchen's live data and changes it, through function-calling scoped to the caller's own tenant. It can report what is running low, record that ten cheeseburgers were sold, log a purchase, or draft a product, a recipe or a menu item from culinary knowledge and put it on the menu — confirming exactly what it changed. It works by typing or by talking: speech recognition and natural text-to-speech come from ElevenLabs, and both the interface and the assistant work in English and Bulgarian. A curated cookbook of 64+ professional recipes across eight cuisines can be copied into a kitchen one recipe at a time, and nothing enters that kitchen until it is added.
The published architecture is a Node.js, Express and Prisma backend on a dedicated PostgreSQL database, with React front-ends behind Apache and Cloudflare. Accounts use e-mail verification, JWT sessions and optional two-factor authentication. Billing runs through GembaPay, the vendor's own gateway, and GembaKitchen stores no card numbers. The vendor is explicit about what it is not: not a POS, not a spreadsheet, not a shared database.
What it does
- Record a sale and let the recipe's ingredients come off the shelves by themselves
- Track stock in real units, with reorder levels and alerts when something runs low
- Build recipes and read the food cost and margin of each dish from real ingredient prices
- Talk or write to a Claude-powered assistant in English or Bulgarian and have it act on your data
- Price a menu by linking dishes to recipes, with yields and selling prices
- Copy any of 64+ professional recipes into your own kitchen in a single click
- Read revenue, food-cost percentage, profit per dish, top sellers, low stock and waste over 7, 30 or 90 days
When to use GembaKitchen / When not to
A quick filter to help you decide if GembaKitchen is the right fit.
When to use GembaKitchen
- Independent restaurants and cafés still tracking stock on paper or in spreadsheets
- Head chefs and sous-chefs who need the true food cost and margin of every dish
- Kitchen teams with no time to type during service, who would rather dictate a sale
- Caterers and cloud kitchens running several menus from one isolated workspace
- Bilingual brigades that want the same assistant in English and in Bulgarian
When not to use GembaKitchen
- Venues shopping for a till: the vendor states plainly that this is not a POS
- Teams that need the tool to plug into an existing POS, accounting or ERP stack, since no third-party connector is offered
- Developers hoping to build on a public API, which is neither documented nor sold
- Staff who need a phone app, as the product is a browser workspace only
- Kitchens working in any language other than English or Bulgarian
How to use GembaKitchen
A typical end-to-end flow, from setup to results.
- Sign up with an e-mail address and confirm it by the verification e-mail
- Start the 72-hour free trial, which asks for no card
- Open the workspace at the dashboard on dashboard.gembakitchen.com
- Add your products and suppliers so the system knows what is on your shelves
- Build your recipes from those products, or copy them from the 64+ recipe cookbook
- Link recipes to menu items, with their prices and yields
- Record sales as they happen — in one tap, by typing, or by speaking to the assistant
- Ask the assistant, in English or Bulgarian, what is low, what sold, or to draft a new recipe
- Read the 7, 30 or 90-day reports for revenue, food cost, margins and waste
- Before the trial ends, choose a plan and pay by card through GembaPay, or redeem a gift code
Pros & Cons
Pros
- The stock, recipe, menu and sales chain is genuinely linked: a sale updates inventory with nobody typing
- Voice entry in two languages works during service, precisely when typing is impossible
- Food cost and margin per dish are computed from real ingredient prices rather than estimated
- A cookbook of 64+ recipes ships with the product, so a kitchen does not start from an empty database
- A written commitment never to train AI models on customer data, with all five processors named individually
- Hosting declared in the EU, no card data stored, and a security audit published in full detail
- Low entry cost: a 72-hour trial without a card, then €29 a month, falling to about €23.25 on a yearly commitment
Cons
- A very young vendor: the company was registered on 22 January 2026, with €5 of capital and a single owner-manager
- No customer references, testimonials or usage figures are published anywhere
- No third-party integrations at all — no POS, accounting or ERP connector is offered
- No public API and no developer documentation, so the product cannot be built upon
- No mobile application, and the interface exists in English and Bulgarian only
- No permanent free plan, card payment only, and no Data Processing Agreement published or offered
- The security audit is the vendor's own, run with automated agents: no accredited certification body is named
Pricing & Plans
There is no permanent free plan. GembaKitchen opens with a 72-hour free trial that requires no card, after which continued access requires an active paid subscription. The lowest paid entry point is €29 per month on the one-month plan. Longer commitments lower the effective monthly rate: €79 for three months, €149 for six months and €279 for twelve months, the last amounting to roughly €23.25 per month. Every plan is billed by card through GembaPay and renews automatically until cancelled, cancellation taking effect at the end of the period already paid for.
- Free trial — €0 for 72 hours
- no card required
- 1 month — €29 per month
- 3 months — €79
- billed quarterly (shown as the popular plan)
- 6 months — €149
- billed half-yearly
- 12 months — €279
- billed yearly
Data, GDPR & hosting
A consolidated view of how GembaKitchen handles your data.
GDPR overview
The GDPR is implemented concretely rather than merely invoked. GEMBA EOOD (EIK 208656371, Varna) names itself as controller and sets out its legal bases: performance of the contract, legitimate interests for security and abuse prevention, legal obligations for accounting, and consent where it applies, withdrawable at any time. The rights of access, rectification, erasure, export, restriction and objection are listed, with contacts@gembakitchen.com as the channel, and the Bulgarian Commission for Personal Data Protection is named as supervisory authority alongside any local one. Hosting is declared in the EU; where AI processors operate outside the EEA the vendor relies on the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses, and five processors are named individually. One nuance deserves flagging: the site never actually claims to be "GDPR compliant" — it applies the regulation without asserting conformity.
Who owns the data?
Under the Terms of Service you keep ownership of everything you enter — products, stock, recipes, menus, sales and related records, which the vendor calls "Your Content". GEMBA EOOD takes only the limited rights it needs to host, process and display that content in order to provide the service to you. Workspace data is treated as business rather than personal data and stays isolated in your own tenant, every record scoped to a restaurant identifier inside a dedicated database that is never shared with other applications. You can delete your account permanently from the dashboard, a step protected by two-factor authentication; deletion is irreversible, so the vendor advises exporting anything you need beforehand.
Reuse rights
The data stays yours to reuse as you see fit: the licence you grant is limited to running the service, so no permission is needed to export your recipes, costings or sales history and use them elsewhere. An export can be requested at any time, and is recommended before closing an account. On its own side the vendor sets out a closed list of uses: operating your account, processing the assistant's chat and voice requests, taking payment through GembaPay, sending service e-mails such as verification codes and expiry reminders, keeping the platform secure, and meeting legal obligations. It commits in writing that workspace data is not used to train AI models and that personal data is neither sold nor rented. Message text — and the audio when you speak — is passed to Anthropic and ElevenLabs to generate a reply, which is why the policy asks you not to put unnecessary personal data into assistant messages.
Data retention & training
Hosting summary
The service and its database are hosted by Hetzner in EU data centres, and the privacy policy states outright that hosting is in the EU. No specific country is named for the product. Each tenant lives in a dedicated PostgreSQL database that is never shared with other applications, with every record scoped to a restaurant identifier. Cloudflare sits in front for network and CDN duties, TLS termination and Turnstile bot protection. Some processors — the AI providers in particular — may process data outside the EEA; where that happens the vendor relies on the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses. Data in transit is encrypted with TLS, passwords are hashed, payment webhooks are signed, and card details never reach GembaKitchen because payment runs through GembaPay. The controller, GEMBA EOOD, is established in Varna, Bulgaria, and Bulgarian law governs the contract, so the applicable supervisory authority is the Bulgarian Commission for Personal Data Protection.
Things to keep in mind
Risks and trade-offs to weigh before adopting GembaKitchen.
- AI output can simply be wrong. The vendor itself warns that the assistant gives no professional, nutritional, food-safety, financial or legal advice — an invented allergen or a mis-costed dish can still reach a customer's plate.
- Letting the assistant do the data entry can quietly erode the team's own grasp of stock and cost. On the day the tool is unavailable, staff who never learned the numbers are left guessing mid-service.
- Voice capture in a loud kitchen is easy to get wrong: a spoken sale landing on the wrong dish corrupts both stock and margin at once, and the audit ledger will faithfully record the mistake as fact.
- The vendor is very young — incorporated in January 2026, €5 of capital, a single owner-manager, no published customers. Continuity matters for a system holding your entire back of house, so export your data regularly.
- The published security audit is written by the vendor and run with automated agents. It reports a critical authentication flaw fixed in July 2026, but no accredited third party has verified any of it.
- A single e-mail address serves legal, GDPR and support requests, and no Data Processing Agreement is published or offered. Escalation routes are thin if something goes wrong with your data.
- Assistant messages and voice audio leave the platform for Anthropic and ElevenLabs, possibly outside the EEA. The policy asks you not to put unnecessary personal data into them — a rule busy staff will forget.
Setup & Integrations
Technical difficulty
Low. There is nothing to install: GembaKitchen is a browser workspace reached after an e-mail-verified signup, and the 72-hour trial opens without a card. No technical skill is required and there are no connectors to configure, because none are offered. The real effort is data entry — getting your products, suppliers and recipes into the system — and the vendor mitigates it in two ways: the assistant can draft products, recipes and menu items on request, and the 64+ recipe cookbook can be copied in rather than retyped. Two-factor authentication is optional and enabled by the user.
Deployment
Supported languages
Behind GembaKitchen
Resources
All the official URLs gathered for verification and reference.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need a card to try GembaKitchen?
What does it cost once the trial is over?
Is there a permanent free plan?
Which AI powers the assistant, and in what languages?
Is my kitchen data used to train AI models?
Where is the data hosted, and who else touches it?
Can other restaurants see my recipes or numbers?
Is there an API or a mobile app?
Who is behind GembaKitchen, and how old is the company?
What is the minimum age to use the service?
Should you pick GembaKitchen?
GembaKitchen is narrower than it first looks, and better for it. It does not try to run a restaurant; it runs the back of house, and it does so by linking four things that usually drift apart — stock, recipes, menu and sales. Selling a dish moves the shelves and books the cost, so the food-cost percentage and the profit per dish are calculated rather than guessed. That alone would make it useful to a kitchen still living in spreadsheets.
What distinguishes it is who does the typing. The Claude-powered assistant does not only answer questions: it acts, within the caller's own tenant, and it does so by voice in English or Bulgarian. In a kitchen mid-service, that is the difference between data that stays current and data that quietly rots. The 64+ recipe cookbook removes the empty-database problem that kills most such tools in week one.
The reservations are about the vendor rather than the software. GEMBA EOOD was entered in the Bulgarian register on 22 January 2026, with €5 of capital and one owner-manager, and it publishes no customer references at all. There are no integrations, no API and no mobile app. The security audit is unusually transparent — it names a critical authentication flaw and its fix — but it is the vendor's own work, verified by no accredited body.
For an independent kitchen, the calculation is easy: a 72-hour trial with no card, then €29 a month. That is cheap enough to test against your own service. Judge it on whether the assistant survives a real Friday night, and keep exporting your data while you decide.
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