Long's Bakery has made scratch donuts in Indianapolis since 1955, and the recipes are the whole business. They lived on notecards, handwritten, and notecards leave with whoever holds them. For more than a decade we built the systems that run the bakery, starting with recipes only the equipment ever knows.
Long's has made scratch donuts by hand since 1955. The recipes are the reason people line up, and they lived where recipes have always lived: on notecards, in someone's handwriting. Notecards leave with whoever holds them, and these were.
Off-the-shelf bakery software doesn't solve that. It treats a recipe as a document to store, when for Long's the recipe is the one asset that can never be copied. They needed the recipe to run the kitchen without any single person ever holding all of it.
A recipe on a card is one photo away from a competitor's kitchen. The only way to protect it was to make sure no one on the line ever needs to see the whole thing.
More than a decade of custom software for Long's: recipe protection wired into the equipment, demand forecasting that cuts waste, and a full retail layer across both stores.
Digitized recipes drive the equipment directly. A connected scale tells a baker to pour until it says stop, so the recipe runs perfectly and no one ever learns it.
Predictive donut-quantity forecasting models real-world signals, including weather and Colts home games, so the bakery makes what the day will actually sell.
A custom point-of-sale app with terminals, cash-drawer and QR hardware, built for how the counter actually moves.
A customer-facing display app that pairs with the registers, so the order is clear on both sides of the counter.
The full retail layer is deployed per store across both locations, so the kitchen and the counter run the same way at each.
Almost everything we ship runs on the same modern Microsoft stack: proven, supported, and easy to hire for years from now. Cutting edge but never bleeding edge.
The distinctive part is the wiring: digitized recipes drive networked equipment like a connected scale, so the machine tells a baker to pour until it says stop, and the full recipe never leaves the system.
What began as protecting the recipes grew into the software that runs the floor: recipe-driven equipment, demand forecasting that reads the weather and the Colts schedule, and a custom point of sale across both stores. We were Long's software shop for more than ten years.
Tell us the challenge in plain language. We scope the work on complexity, commit to the figure in the room, and stay for the years after launch.
A made-to-order manufacturer whose workflow platform ran three years straight without a single billable fix.
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