Happy birthday to us! Labl.it turns five
Labl.it turns five today. We can’t quite believe it, what started as a post-it note on a kitchen table during lockdown, has turned into a company serving over 4000+ kitchens across the UK.
Our founders have spent years in commercial kitchens, so the problem wasn't theoretical for them: sticky labels, marker pens, illegible dates, and the low-level dread of an EHO visit landing on a busy week. They knew there had to be a better way to do it.
11 months after that first idea, we launched Labl.it on the same day Natasha's Law came into force.
That date might have got into the headlines, but the 11 months before it did the real work: development and testing in our own live kitchen, mid-service, with chefs telling us the buttons were too small, the first labels we used wouldn't stick to a cold gastro tray, and nobody had time to scroll through a list of 200 products to find chicken. Every one of those complaints ended up driving a feature or fix in the device. By the end of our first year, we'd won Tech Startup of the Year.
No blog or social media post can quite capture 5 whole years, but we can certainly try. For us, five years has been...
- 4000+ UK kitchens printing with Labl.it, all cutting admin time by up to 75%
- A customer base spanning independent cafés, university campuses, NHS Trusts, Premier League clubs, institutional caterers and multi-site restaurant groups
- Nine award wins, including Most Innovative Business and Labelling Solution of the Year, and finalists for two more upcoming awards in 2026
- A second site in 2025: a dedicated operations facility for faster shipping, quicker repairs and better support
- A team that has grown by 50% and a customer base up 55% in the last year, and a bigger HQ at Southampton Science Park
- A product that's gone well beyond printing with the Menu Analyser tool, expiry alerts, wastage reporting, cross-site dashboards and TempLog® accessories launching in early 2027
What are we most proud of? The people. Ours and yours.
Our team all came from hospitality, so the problem Labl.it solves isn't abstract to anyone here. We get commercial kitchens, and it’s exactly what makes us so good at helping them.
And our customers have written most of the roadmap for us, through feedback.labl.it, support tickets, and telling our team things on site visits. Some of them have been with us since the first few months and still email us with ideas, and the growth and product improvements we’ve achieved simply wouldn’t have been possible without them.
We'd love to claim the good ideas were all ours. But most of them weren't.
Temperature monitoring is next: a patent-protected food probe and fridge sensor, so temperature checks and labelling live in one place.
Thank you to everyone who's chosen Labl.it, recommended us to a mate in another kitchen, or put up with our very early software. Five years in, we're at 4000+ kitchens and counting, supported by a rapidly growing team. Not bad for something that started on a post-it note.
