Production and inventory software for kombucha brewers.

Common challenges

The brew log lives in a notebook by the tanks. The SCOBY hotel is tracked by memory and whoever fed it last. Bottle counts get guessed at the end of a bottling run because the 500 L batch didn't split evenly between 330 ml and 750 ml formats, and nobody wrote down the actual yield. When a Shopify order comes in for a flavour you're low on, you find out when the picker gets to the shelf, not before.

Then a customer asks which batch their bottle came from, or a supplier recalls a tea lot, and the answer involves cross-referencing several spreadsheets and someone's recollection of roughly when. This is what happens when a fermentation business outgrows a notebook without adopting software built for how kombucha works: one liquid batch, several bottle sizes, and a shelf life that starts the moment it is capped.

How OakNex maps to your day

Start with a recipe scaled in litres: tea, sugar, starter culture, flavouring, all quantified against batch volume rather than a fixed bottle count. When you plan a brew, the recipe scales with it — a 300 L batch and a 600 L batch pull proportional ingredients without manual re-entry. Versioning means a recipe tweak (less sugar, a new flavour ratio) forks a new draft and goes through approval before it's live, so each brew is tied to a specific, dated recipe version rather than a record edited in place.

Bottling is where liquid becomes count. A work order records the real split — however many 330 ml and 750 ml bottles the batch actually produced — allocates the batch's cost across them by the litres each size represents, and logs any leftover liquid or breakage as waste against that specific batch, not a vague shrinkage number at month end. Each bottle-format-and-flavour combination gets its own lot, so a finished-goods lot traces backward through the recipe to the tea and culture lots that went into it, and forward to every shipment it left on — the answer to a recall question in one search, not a week of digging.

From there it's production planning with routing that carries setup and run minutes so you can see whether Thursday's bottling run collides with Friday's labelling capacity, purchasing that raises a reorder suggestion for tea, sugar, bottles and caps before you run out rather than after, and Shopify sync that keeps online stock counts and fulfillment status accurate without maintaining a second system. FEFO picking defaults finished bottles to first-expired-first-out, both in production and on shipment, so stock does not go stale unnoticed in the cold store.

Who this isn't for

If you run a 50-tank facility with automated filling lines and in-line sensors reporting brix and pH in real time, you need plant-floor SCADA integration we don't do — OakNex plans and records production, it doesn't read hardware. It's built for the batch size where a person still decides when a brew is ready and someone still counts bottles by hand at the end of a run: a small kombucha operation scaling past spreadsheets, not an industrial beverage plant.