If you’re reading this because your Castiron storefront stopped loading, here’s the short version: Castiron was acquired by T.D. Jakes Enterprises in November 2024, rolled into a new platform called Nourysh, and the original Castiron app went fully dark in early 2026. Their official Facebook page indicates they are no longer in business. If your shop is gone, there’s currently no indication it’s coming back.

I’m Meir. I built FoodShop, a different platform for home bakers. I’m writing this because I keep seeing the same posts in cottage food Facebook groups: “Anyone else’s Castiron not working?” “My shop is gone, what now?” “Can I at least export my photos?” Most of you can’t even log in. That sucks. Let’s talk about what to do next.

What actually happened to Castiron?

Quick timeline so you have the facts:

  • Castiron launched in 2021 as a SaaS storefront for food makers
  • November 21, 2024: T.D. Jakes Enterprises acquires Castiron
  • The platform gets repurposed into Nourysh, an e-commerce platform for underrepresented and under-resourced entrepreneurs, powered by the Good Soil Movement
  • Early 2026: Castiron’s seller platform stops working for many users. The marketing site remains online but appears unmaintained
  • Castiron’s official Facebook page is updated to indicate they are no longer in business

If you’re building a small business and want a platform aligned with the Good Soil Movement’s mission, Nourysh might be a fit. For most home bakers I talk to, it’s not what you signed up for when you joined Castiron.

Why “Castiron alternative” is the wrong question

I see a lot of bakers asking “what’s the closest replacement for Castiron?” That’s a reasonable question, but it sets you up to make the same mistake twice.

Castiron was a storefront. That was its whole job: take orders, accept payments, look nice. It didn’t help you price your cookies. It didn’t generate FDA-compliant nutrition labels. It didn’t track allergens. It didn’t tell you whether you were making or losing money on each item.

That gap was your problem the whole time you were on Castiron. A like-for-like replacement gives you a new storefront and the same gap.

That’s why I keep telling bakers in the Facebook groups: don’t migrate, upgrade.

“Upgrade, not migrate” - what that actually means

You can’t export from Castiron right now anyway. The platform is down. There’s nothing to move. So you’re rebuilding from scratch whether you want to or not.

Here’s what I’d do if I were you:

  1. Pick your top 3-5 sellers. Not your whole catalog. The items that actually drove most of your revenue.
  2. Rebuild those properly in whatever tool you choose: ingredient costs broken down, allergens tracked, pricing that reflects real margins.
  3. Get a storefront live with just those 3-5 products.
  4. Add the rest over the next few weeks as orders come in and time allows.

A leaner catalog with proper pricing and compliant labels will out-earn a 50-item store with guess-pricing every single time. Most of you already know this. You’ve felt it on the items where customers haggled you down because you weren’t sure of your numbers.

Why I built FoodShop in the first place

Every home baker I talked to was pricing in a spreadsheet, guessing at allergens, and dreading the day a customer asked for a nutrition label. Nobody had built the operational tool. Castiron’s storefront was nice. The rest of the problem was still yours to solve at midnight in a Google Sheet.

So FoodShop is the operational engine plus the storefront, in one place:

  • Pantry model. You build your pantry once: every ingredient you bake with, package size, what you paid for it. After that, every recipe pulls from it. The work compounds instead of starting over each time.
  • Recipe costing engine. Per-item cost, per-serving cost, and profit margin calculated automatically from your real prices. You see immediately whether a cookie is making you $0.40 or losing you $0.15.
  • Cottage food labels for all 50 states plus DC. The platform pulls the documented disclaimer wording, allergen format, and net weight format from your state’s published cottage food rules to generate a print-ready draft. Always verify the final label against your state’s current requirements before printing.
  • Allergen tracking. Pulled automatically from a curated database of ~8,000 ingredients based on USDA nutrition data (SR Legacy). FoodShop flags allergens based on standard ingredient definitions. Just always double-check your supplier’s current packaging when a manufacturer changes formulations.
  • Storefront with Square payments. Customers order, pay by card through Square, you fulfill. Same shape as Castiron, just connected to the rest.

How does FoodShop compare to Homegrown and other alternatives?

I’m going to be honest about the alternatives because you’ve been burned once and you should know what you’re walking into.

Homegrown (findhomegrown.com) - $10/month billed annually (or $12.50/month if billed monthly), designed for any food vendor: sandwiches, meal prep, jerky, baked goods, you name it. Simple ordering page, set up in about 15 minutes. If all you need is a link to take orders, this is the cheapest path. A lot of Castiron refugees have already landed here.

The catch: Homegrown is not built for bakers specifically. No recipe costing, no nutrition labels, no allergen handling, no per-ingredient cost tracking. If those words feel relevant to your business, you’re going to outgrow it.

Square Online / Shopify - generic e-commerce. Works, but you’ll spend a weekend configuring it and you’ll still do all your pricing math in a spreadsheet. No allergens. No nutrition labels.

Etsy - works for some bakers, but Etsy’s rules around food sellers vary by state and they keep tightening them.

FoodShop - built specifically for home bakers, whether you’re just starting to sell to neighbors or already shipping 50 orders a week. Pantry, costing, margins, FDA labels, allergens, and storefront in one place. The honest version: if you’re a sandwich vendor, go to Homegrown. If you bake, come look at FoodShop. The costing engine alone earns its keep on the first wedding cake you price correctly.

What I can actually offer (and what I can’t)

I’m not going to promise to migrate your shop for you. I’m a solo founder. That doesn’t scale, and there’s nothing to migrate from Castiron right now anyway.

What I will do is take the worst part of starting over off your plate. Inside FoodShop there’s a feature called “Tell me what you bake with.” You list the ingredients you actually use, the package sizes, and what you paid. Send it to me. I build your pantry for you, properly, with the right data behind every ingredient. You wake up the next morning and your pantry is ready. From there you can build recipes the same day.

That’s the closest thing to migration I can honestly offer. It’s better than migration, because we’re building it right this time instead of carrying over old assumptions.

If you want anything beyond that, I’m in the Crisp chat on foodshop.biz, usually within a few hours. Ask me anything.

  • If your top sellers have weird ingredients I can help you set them up
  • If you don’t know what to price a custom cake at, I’ll walk you through it
  • If your state has a labeling requirement you’re unsure about, I’ll tell you what I know and what I don’t

It’s not white-glove migration. It’s a founder who answers his own messages, and a concierge pantry to get you unstuck.

What to do this week

If you’ve been sitting on this for a few weeks because the whole thing is overwhelming, here’s the smallest possible next step:

  • Pick your top 3 sellers
  • Open a notes app and write down the ingredients in each
  • Find the receipts for your last grocery run for those ingredients
  • That’s your starting point in any tool you choose

You don’t have to commit to a platform today. You just have to start writing things down so the data is yours, not someone else’s.

Going deeper

If you want to dig into the pieces Castiron never helped you with:

Last thing

Castiron shutting down is a bad thing that’s going to make a few months of your life harder. I’m sorry. The silver lining, if there is one, is that you don’t have to rebuild on the same foundation. You get to choose better this time.

If FoodShop sounds like the right fit, you can try it at foodshop.biz. If it’s not, that’s okay too. I genuinely hope you land somewhere that works.

Either way, message me. I’m in the chat.

– Meir, FoodShop