How To - Food Recipe Costings


There are four setup areas for the use of food stocks within Product Modelling:

  • Purchase Lines

  • Recipes

  • Choices

  • Prepared Items (only used with full recipe breakdown stocks and if applicable to the site setup


Purchase Lines

Purchase lines are created to form all of the ingredients used to make up each recipe dish. If only a recipe cost is used, then only one purchase line would be created, e.g., with the name “Food Cost”.

The purchase lines will filter through into the stock system and be the products that are counted as part of the stock taking procedure and will show the purchases and reductions against them based on deliveries and sales.

To effectively maintain purchase lines it is recommended that during their creation they are broken down in to subcategories for ease of setup and stock counting. The sub categories used is at the discretion of the customer but some recommended ones could be as follows:

  • Fruit & Vegetables

  • Dry Goods

  • Frozen

  • Fish

  • Meat

  • Dairy

  • Misc Ingredients



Recipes

Recipe product lines are the actual products that are going to be sold via the POS terminal. These contain all of the purchase line products to make up that dish item, and could be just one purchase line as a food cost, or all of the individual components that make up a dish with their exact weight, volume or portion amount.

It is also possible that a recipe can contain a choice, another recipe or a prepared item.



Choices

Choices are created and inserted into recipes to form sales prompts when the recipe is sold on the POS terminal, e.g., should the dish be “hot or cold” or “brown bread or white bread”.

Depending on the type of choice offered these can be built either using recipe items (if the choice item has to come out of stock) or an instruction line (if the item has no stock value eg hot or cold).

It is possible to have multiple choices contained within a recipe and a choice can have a mixture of both recipes and instruction lines, e.g., a sandwich could prompt for “Horseradish or No Horseradish” and where no horseradish is used an instruction line can be used as there is no effect on the stock.



Prepared Items

In some kitchens food dishes are prepared as a batch or pre-prepared item, e.g., a sauce, soup or dressing. A prepared item is made up of individual purchase line items to make a bulk amount and then a quantity of that bulk amount is used within a recipe to make up the final dish to sell, e.g., a soup batch might make up 1kg in total, and contain a mixture of stock, vegetables, herbs etc.