Introducing CutSheet: Real Availability for Local Meat
The question nobody in local food can answer
A restaurant that wants local beef on the menu every week has one question: who has it, how much, and by when? Today the answer is a phone tree. Call the rancher. The rancher calls the processor. The processor checks a whiteboard. Three days later you get an answer that was true two days ago.
It isn't anyone's fault. The supply side of local meat is genuinely hard to promise against:
- A rancher selling a beef share is legally selling the live animal — before processing, before anyone knows exactly what it will yield.
- Take-home meat is roughly 40-some percent of live weight, and the precise number is unknowable until the carcass is on the rail.
- Processor slots — the chokepoint of the whole chain — book out months in advance.
So every promise in local meat is a promise against uncertain future supply. Storefronts and marketplaces can tell you what a farm listed. Nobody can tell you what a farm can actually deliver.
Why we think we can answer it
CashSheet runs production planning inside working meat processing plants. At the center of that product is an optimization engine whose whole job is exactly this question: given the animals coming in, the yields they produce, the capacity on the floor, and the orders already committed — what can we still promise, and for when?
Plant sales desks use it to answer availability on real orders today. When we looked at the local-food world — ranchers selling shares, restaurants trying to source locally, small processors juggling everyone's schedule — we realized the hard part of their problem is the one we had already built.
What CutSheet will be
CutSheet connects the three parties of the local meat supply chain around real availability:
- Restaurants ask every supplier at once and get answers they can put on a menu.
- Ranchers sell forward with confidence — harvest dates, yields, and existing commitments accounted for, not guessed.
- Processors stop being the bottleneck everyone works around and become the schedule everyone can see.
The name is the industry's own word. A cut sheet is the instruction sheet a customer fills out for the butcher — the one document where a rancher, a buyer, and a processor already meet. That felt like the right place to build.
Where it stands, honestly
This is an announcement of direction, not a launch. The engine is real and in production; the local-food product around it is being built now. We're not going to promise dates — a product about trustworthy promises shouldn't start with a careless one.
What we can offer today is a front-row seat. We've opened an early-access waitlist at cutsheet.net — whether you raise cattle, run a cutting floor, or buy for a kitchen, tell us who you are and we'll share progress as it happens. The first conversations we have will shape what gets built first.
