You plan tomorrow's production in a notebook, lose track of what ends up in the bin at the end of the day, and your allergen notice dates from before the last recipe change. One ingredient forgotten on a record, and it is your own responsibility on the line in front of an allergic customer.
Who the application is for
For food trade artisans — delicatessens, bakers, pastry makers, caterers — who want to cost out their recipes, keep their allergens up to date, track use-by dates by batch and plan their daily production. It is a free foundation, on top of which trade-specific applications can be installed, such as butchery cutting or bakery batches.
What the application does
- Propagates allergens from the ingredients to the recipe and then to the finished product, including when an ingredient is itself made from another recipe.
- Keeps a label-up-to-date indicator that switches off as soon as the composition changes, until a manager validates the label again.
- Costs out each recipe: an editable price per ingredient, a trimming rate, the number of units produced, the unit ingredient cost, the margin and the ingredient cost rate.
- Carries the origin, supplier batch, manufacturing date and use-by date on each batch, with a status — fresh, to be sold soon, past date — recalculated every time it is displayed.
- Opens a dedicated screen for batches still in stock whose date is approaching or has passed, and schedules a daily reminder activity for the person in charge on each one, as long as it has not already been sent for that batch.
- Prints a variable-weight label: composition by descending quantity, allergens highlighted, use-by date, batch and a price worked out from the weight entered.
- Compares each day's suggested production, based on sales history, against orders already taken, and flags in red whatever is not covered.
Day to day
- Declare the allergens on each purchased raw ingredient; on a finished product, create a recipe record with its ingredients instead, and the allergens work themselves out.
- Cost out the recipe: units produced, price and trimming rate per ingredient, to get the ingredient cost and the margin.
- Each morning, open the day's production: compare the suggested quantity, what has already been ordered, and the quantity you decide to produce.
- On a batch, fill in the origin, the supplier batch and the use-by date, or let the application suggest it when a shelf life is declared on the product.
- Print the variable-weight label from a recipe whose label-up-to-date indicator is green, after weighing the product.
What the application does not do
- It does not keep a full hygiene record: no temperature logs, no cleaning schedule, no self-inspection record.
- Its recipe cost remains an ingredient cost only: labour, energy and packaging are not counted.
- It does not act as a till.
- It does not suggest any shelf life, any alert threshold or any default label wording: these are your own figures and decisions. These rules change, and the application helps you keep track of them: it does not deliver regulatory compliance and does not replace the advice of a professional or the relevant authority.
Getting started
First declare the allergens on your purchased raw ingredients, then create a recipe record for each finished product with its ingredients and the number of units it produces. Then set, in the settings, your alert delay before the use-by date and the ingredient cost rate you are aiming for: none of these values is supplied, because they depend on your product and your workshop.
Going further
To find out whether this application suits your business and how to activate it, compare the plans or write to us.