Who makes ShelfStep
ShelfStep is built by one person, from a family that makes food for a living. It exists because the path from a good recipe to a retail shelf is real, learnable, and badly documented — and because the people walking it are usually doing so at night, after the kitchen closes.
The short version
ShelfStep LLC is an Indiana company, founded in September 2026 in Fort Wayne by Marco Soe. Marco’s family runs a Thai restaurant in Fort Wayne, and the questions ShelfStep answers — is this an acidified food, who signs the scheduled process, what does a buyer actually ask for, what should a case cost — are the questions that came up at that kitchen’s table when the family first thought about putting a sauce in a jar.
Marco’s day job is building software for large organizations — the kind with auditors, regulators, and records that have to hold up years later. That is where the product’s instincts come from: a plan that knows what the next step is, records that survive someone official asking, and AI that drafts and researches but never quietly decides something a buyer or an inspector will rely on. ShelfStep gets built in the evenings, which is when most of its customers are working on their products too.
What we believe
The specialists stay. ShelfStep does not replace a Process Authority, a lab, or a lawyer. It gets your answers in order so their review is shorter and cheaper, and it says so on every screen where the difference matters.
Your recipe is yours. Formulas, quantities, costs and suppliers are your confidential business information. They are never shown to other users, never sold, never used to train AI models, and the people running ShelfStep do not read them. That is written into the Terms, not just this page.
Nothing made up. The sample brand on the site, Sunrise Pantry, is fictional and labelled as such wherever it appears. Every guide cites the regulation or FDA material it draws on so you can read the source yourself.
How it is run
Independently and without outside investors. ShelfStep is paid for by its subscriptions, which is why the pricing page says what each plan includes and the offers page says how free time works. There is no growth team, no sales team, and no one whose job is to get you to upgrade; there is one person who reads every email sent to hello@shelfstep.com.
Where to go next
See the product on a sample launch in the live demo, read the guides, or get in touch.