A few weeks ago, I went to Amar Colony for another pitching day.
I had BeanThere open on my laptop with a simple goal: walk into independent food spots, show founders what we were building, and get honest, unfiltered feedback from people who run real kitchens every single day.
If you’ve ever walked through Amar Colony, you know it’s packed with food spots, bakeries, and chaat corners. But Rue Beurre stands out the moment you step inside. It’s an authentic artisanal bakery and café created by Chef Aniket Mittal (view on Google Maps), where laminated pastries, sourdough, and specialty coffee are treated with serious craft.
I walked in and introduced myself. Aniket was welcoming right from the start. He was in the middle of kitchen prep, but he pulled up a stool, gave me ten minutes, and was genuinely open to hearing what BeanThere was about.
Clean vs Cluttered
I opened my laptop on the counter and showed him the screens.
His first reaction was immediate: he liked how minimal and uncluttered it was.
If you’ve ever looked at a POS terminal behind the billing counter of an Indian restaurant or bakery, you know what they look like. Most of them look like Windows 98 crashed into an Excel spreadsheet. Dense grids of fifty microscopic buttons, confusing nested menus, and tiny text that gives you a headache just trying to ring up a black coffee.
BeanThere was the exact opposite: clean typography, zero clutter, and fast. You can punch an order without feeling like you’re operating an air-traffic radar.
We had good momentum. And then came the question that stopped me in my tracks.
The Feature We Didn’t Have
Aniket looked at the billing flow and asked:
“Can it calculate the food costing of each product? And can I manage raw inventory?”
In an artisanal bakery, ingredients aren't just line items. High-grade French butter, imported dark chocolate, dairy, and pastry flour make up the bulk of your expenses.
If ingredient prices swing and your billing system can't break down the actual raw cost of a croissant or subtract butter and flour as you bake, you’re essentially guessing your margins.
And the honest truth? BeanThere didn’t have it.
We simply hadn't built recipe costing. We didn’t have raw inventory tracking.
Normally, a software pitch ends right here with a polite hedge:“That’s on our roadmap for next quarter. We’ll ping you when it’s out.”
I didn't want to give him a corporate excuse. Aniket had taken time out of his kitchen to tell me the exact thing his business actually needed.
I looked at him and said: “We don’t have it today. Give me three days.”
72 Hours to Production
That evening, our existing priority list was put on pause.
For the next 72 hours, we locked in. No bureaucratic meetings, no long specs. Just focused execution on the exact workflow an actual operator had asked for:
Built raw ingredient costing from scratch—calculating exact food cost and gross profit per dish based on raw ingredient weights and batch yields.
Built real-time stock deductions so that every time an order settles at the counter, raw pantry ingredients update automatically without manual spreadsheet entry.
Refined the interface, stress-tested edge-case calculations, and pushed the build straight to live production.
Three days from a conversation across a bakery counter to code running live in production.
Testing It Live with Aniket
On Day 4, I walked back into Rue Beurre in Amar Colony.
We pulled up a stool at the counter, opened the production app, and started plugging in recipes together.
We entered raw ingredient prices, set up batch quantities, and watched the system compute the exact food cost and margin per pastry right in front of us.
He tested it, scrolled through the inventory deductions, and liked how simple and practical it was. It solved the exact problem he cared about, without any unnecessary complexity.
Right there across the counter, Rue Beurre became BeanThere’s very first pilot store.
What Closing Our 1st Cafe Taught Us
Closing our first store didn’t come from a fancy sales deck or a generic marketing campaign.
It came from doing three simple things:
- Showing up in person to listen.
- Admitting what our software was missing without getting defensive.
- Shipping the exact solution the operator needed in 72 hours.
Legacy POS giants win by default because of market share and brand inertia. But they move like glaciers. If an independent café or bakery asks them for a feature, they get a support ticket and months of radio silence.
Independent software wins by listening and moving at the speed of the kitchen.
Huge respect and thanks to Chef Aniket and the entire team at Rue Beurre in Amar Colony for giving a young founder their time, being direct about what they needed, and believing in us.
Opening 10 Pilot Spots for Independent Cafés & Bakeries
We don’t want to sell you bloated software you’ll regret buying next month. We want to build your store's ideal workflow alongside you.