Cide Kic
Background
For many kitchens, recipes still live in binders, notebooks, or someone’s head. Training happens verbally. Inventory is tracked by hand. When a key staff member leaves, critical knowledge often leaves with them. Kitchens are fast-paced during service, but their systems can be outdated, slowing them down. Cide Kic was created to change that reality.
Founded by chef and restaurateur James Hudak, Cide Kic grew out of firsthand experience in professional kitchens. Hudak understood the pressure of service, the importance of consistency, and the frustration of managing complex operations with outdated tools. While front-of-house technology has advanced leaps and bounds, back-of-house operations often remain untouched by modern digital advances.
What began as a solution piloted in a single kitchen needed to scale to enable flexible, intuitive use in any kitchen environment. Cide Kic was building software, but more importantly, it was rethinking how culinary knowledge can evolve when properly captured, shared, and sustained. Enter Team Mindgrub!
Together, we helped transform an early-stage idea into a market-ready platform designed to support real kitchen workflows while laying a strong foundation for future growth.
The Opportunity
Cide Kic entered the market as a startup in a traditionally low-tech industry. The challenge was not simply launching a product, but earning adoption in fast-paced kitchen environments where time is scarce and tolerance for friction is (rightfully) very low.
The early platform worked in a limited setting, but it wasn’t built to support multiple kitchens, varying audiences, or long-term growth. At the same time, the product’s vision was expanding. Restaurants with static menus. Event-driven kitchens with constantly changing needs. Culinary institutions training the next generation of chefs. Even individual cooks looking to organize and refine their recipes.
Cide Kic also saw an opportunity to use AI in a way that genuinely supported chefs, without disrupting the way kitchens already work. The opportunity was clear. Build a scalable, intuitive platform that fits naturally into kitchen workflows, while using AI to remove friction rather than introduce complexity.
Our Approach
We partnered with Cide Kic to turn an ambitious idea into a focused, scalable platform that kitchens would actually use.
Clarifying the Product Vision
Together, we immediately defined what the platform needed to deliver and what could come later. With many possible directions, clarity was crucial. The team aligned on a core, modern experience built for professional kitchens today, with the flexibility to grow into new audiences over time.
Designing for Real Kitchen Workflows
Chefs and their teams don’t have time to take on complex systems or hunt through menus. We designed an experience that feels familiar and immediately usable, even during busy service hours.
Whether a chef is documenting a new dish after service or updating an existing recipe for a seasonal menu, user flows make it easy to create, save, and manage recipes across teams and locations. Recipes can be entered manually or generated with AI support, then reused across menus, events, and kitchens without extra effort.
Practical AI with Hey Chef
AI was introduced within the platform in the form of the practical AI assistant, Hey Chef. Hey Chef helps users generate recipes through natural prompts, remix existing recipes with simple instructions, and save results directly into Cide Kic in a consistent, reusable format. Ingredients, measurements, and instructions are automatically organized into the platform’s recipe structure, so they can be edited, reused, and shared across kitchens without manual cleanup or guesswork. For new kitchens, this dramatically reduces onboarding time and accelerates adoption.
Hey Chef is built on Google Cloud using Vertex AI, enabling structured, reliable responses ready for use in a production system. This work was led through Mindgrub AI Labs, where we focus on applying AI as solutions to real operational challenges.
What We Built
A web-based SaaS platform that enables users to:
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Create, save, and manage recipes across kitchens and teams
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Generate and remix recipes using AI through Hey Chef
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Automatically structure ingredients and instructions for reuse
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Support both professional and personal cooking workflows
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Scale from individual users to multi-location organizations
The Bigger Impact
For as long as they’ve been in operation, much of the restaurant industry’s knowledge has been passed down like folklore: communicated verbally and lost when people move on.
Cide Kic helps preserve that knowledge while making it easier to share, teach, and adapt. By combining modern software with practical AI tools, the platform supports creativity, consistency, and learning across kitchens and classrooms.
It brings the back of the house into the digital era, without losing the human magic that brings the culinary arts to life.