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Using the Recipes feature
Using the Recipes feature

Track your menu item costs with the Recipe feature

Zeemart Ops Team avatar
Written by Zeemart Ops Team
Updated over a week ago

Applicable to: Buyer Hub

The Recipes feature lets you build recipes for your menu items using ingredients you're already buying using Zeemart.

Key features

By comparing the recipe cost and the retail selling price of the menu item, you'll get the food cost percentage that will help you determine whether you're pricing the menu item correctly.

Regular users of the invoice digitisation feature already benefit from seeing the latest prices of these items. Because the recipes are made up of the items in the market list, the cost and food cost percentages columns on the screen above will be constantly updated based on the latest market list prices.

You can also create sub-recipes for certain items that may not appear on the menu but have to be prepared in your kitchen and later used as ingredients in the recipes.

Contents:

Things to know before you start

  • All ingredients must be inventory items or sub-recipes.

  • Ingredient quantities can be specified in any UOMs. See Step 5 in below section for more info.

Creating recipes

  1. Select Recipes on the sidebar navigation, then select the outlet/location the recipe is for.

  2. Click Create new.

  3. Enter the recipe name and the portion that this recipe makes.

  4. Click Add ingredient to start adding ingredients. Remember that all ingredients must be items already added to the Inventory. You can select inventory items or any sub-recipes you've created.

  5. When adding a new ingredient, you can select any UOM to use with the ingredient if it's an Inventory item. For example, you may have added "Soy Sauce" which uses the "btl" UOM in the Inventory, but for this recipe you need to specify the quantity in "ml". You can select "ml" in the dropdown list and we'll ask you to provide a conversion rate to "btl".

    💡 TIP: Click the "Flip units" button if you want to convert from "btl" to "ml" instead.

  6. Continue with the same steps until you've added all the ingredients required. If you need to edit the quantity, click on the ingredient item.

  7. As you add the ingredients, you'll notice on the top right of the screen, the Recipe cost and Cost per portion values change.

    1. Enter the retail price of this menu item (per portion) and see the Food cost % below it change. This is what your menu item actually costs with respect to the selling price.

    2. You can view how much each ingredient costs per portion by clicking the blue link next to Cost per portion.

  8. You can also add some notes or cooking instructions in the text field at the bottom right corner, but this is optional.

  9. When you're done, click Save.

Duplicating data from another recipe

If you are creating another recipe with similar details to another previously created recipe, you can use this feature to quickly load data from another recipe:

1. When creating a recipe, click the Copy data from... button at the top.

2. In the Recipe dropdown list, select the recipe to copy.

3. Click Next. Data from the copied recipe will be loaded.

Setting the threshold for highlighting high food costs

Typically, the ideal food cost percentage for restaurants is in the range of 20-30%. This ideal percentage will vary from business to business.

In the list of recipes, food cost percentages higher than the threshold are highlighted in red like this:

By default, the threshold is set at 22%. To change this value, click Settings, and change the value in the field:

Creating sub-recipes

Sub-recipes are similar to recipes, but there are differences:

  • They can be added to recipes as ingredients.

  • They are meant for non-menu items, hence they are created without specifying retail prices.

  • You can define the recipe yield in another UOM (see scenario #2 below).

It is suitable for:

  1. Items that may not appear on the menu, but have to be prepared in your kitchen and later used as ingredients in the recipes.

  2. When you need to add ingredients to recipes using a UOM different from the inventory UOM (to do this, set the sub-recipe yield in the desired UOM).

  3. When there are common ingredients and quantities used in several recipes - in this way, it works like ingredient templates that you can include in recipes.

The steps to create a sub-recipe are similar to recipes:

1. Select Recipes on the sidebar navigation, then select the outlet/location the recipe is for.

2. Click Create new.

3. Enter the recipe name, but DO NOT enter the portion. Instead, tick the This is a sub-recipe checkbox below the recipe name.

4. Doing this will change the Portion field to Yield instead. Enter the yield for this sub-recipe (the yield is the quantity that will be produced by following the recipe).

4. Click Add ingredient to start adding ingredients. Remember that all ingredients must be items already added to the Inventory.

Continue with the same steps until you've added all the ingredients required. If you need to edit the quantity, click on the ingredient item.

5. You can also add some notes or cooking instructions in the text field at the bottom right corner, but this is optional.

6. When you're done, click Save.

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