A founder with no coding background built the platform Radish runs on.
Radish Events is a B Corp certified catering company in Sydney. Its founder, Henrique Turra, is not a software developer. Over the past year Henrique has built Daikon with Claude Code, and the kitchen, sales, and bookkeeping team now run the business on it every day.
- 74%
of 5.2 tonnes of purchased food eaten over 12 months (26% composted)
- 224
pull requests merged to production
- 1hr
back after every client call, now spent on a personal video quote
- 4
subscription tools folded into Daikon (the fourth under way)
The starting position.
Radish is a founder-run caterer with a small kitchen and events team. It ran on rented software: separate subscriptions for timesheets, an operations database, workflow automation, and client proposals. Each was a partial fit, and the data sat scattered across all four.
Radish also wanted more than an annual food-waste estimate. It wanted a live number the chefs could act on, comparing food in bellies with food in compost. Radish could not find an off-the-shelf product that connects a caterer's supplier invoices to its compost bin, and until recently, software built around one small business meant hiring a development team.
What Radish built.
Henrique learned to build with Claude Code alongside J4RVIS, then built Daikon: one platform for recipe costing, event job sheets, a kitchen iPad mode, timesheets, client invoicing, photo galleries, bar operations, and waste tracking.
A live food-waste number
Claude reads every supplier invoice line by line. A greengrocer line reading "carrot B nch 2 ea" becomes two bunches of carrots, filed as a vegetable, at roughly 300 g a bunch. The team weighs and logs what goes to compost, and Daikon compares the two.
Ingredient costs from this week's invoices
As supplier invoices arrive, Claude extracts each line, matches it to an ingredient, and updates the recipe costs. Menu margins are calculated on what food costs this week.
Sales admin in one step
After each client call, Henrique runs a custom Claude skill that writes the call summary, logs it to the CRM, drafts the follow-up email, and proposes a quote. That work used to fill the hour after every call.
Four subscriptions folded into one platform
Timesheets, the operations database, and workflow automation now run inside Daikon. The client proposal tool is part-way through the move.
Built the way an engineering team would build it
Daikon lives in a monorepo with seven shared packages. It has 71 versioned migrations against a live production database, least-privilege database roles, row-level security, hard cost caps and observability on every AI workflow, and a design system enforced by lint rules.
The result.
Over the 12 months to August 2026, Daikon tracked 5.2 tonnes of purchased food by weight. Of that, 74 per cent was eaten and 26 per cent went to compost, and the chefs see the ratio month by month. Knowing every ingredient by weight also gives Radish carbon footprinting per kilogram of ingredient rather than per dollar spent, stock-take reconciliation, and the evidence for its Food Made Good certification.
The hour Henrique used to spend on admin after a client call now goes into a short personal video, walking the client through their quote line by line. One wedding couple said that video walkthrough was one of the main reasons they chose Radish.
What changed.
| Before | After | |
|---|---|---|
| Food waste | An annual estimate | A live ratio, tracked month by month: 74 per cent eaten, 26 per cent composted |
| Recipe costs | A price list typed in once | Updated from each supplier invoice as it arrives |
| The hour after a client call | Summary, CRM entry, follow-up email, and quote | A personal video walking the client through their quote |
| Software | Four subscriptions, each a partial fit | One platform Radish owns, built around how Radish works |
| Who builds it | Custom software needed a development team | The founder, with Claude Code |
