Recipes

A recipe lists the ingredients and quantities that go into a dish. From that, TypeMenu works out what the dish costs to make, what each portion costs and - for anything you sell - its gross profit and gross margin against the menu price. Recipes also carry allergens: a dish inherits every allergen declared on its ingredients.

What Is a Recipe?

Every recipe has one output - the thing it produces - and one or more ingredient lines. The output is either:

• A menu item - a product variant from your menu (for a simple product, its single variant). “Margherita Pizza - 12 inch” is made from dough, passata, mozzarella and basil.
• A prep ingredient - an ingredient you make in-house and use in other recipes, such as a pizza dough or house sauce. This is how you build sub-recipes.

Each menu item or ingredient can have only one recipe. Before you start, add your ingredients under Menu → Ingredients, each with a base unit and ideally a cost. See Ingredients.

How to Create a Recipe

1. Go to Dashboard, open Menu in the sidebar, then click Recipes
2. Click “Add Recipe”
3. Under Basic Information, choose the Output - the list is grouped into Menu items (shown as “Product - Variant”) and Prep ingredients
4. Enter the Yield Quantity - how many portions (or how many base units of a prep ingredient) one batch of this recipe makes
5. Add Notes if you want method or plating notes stored with the recipe
6. Under Ingredients, click “Add Ingredient” for each line and fill in:
   • Ingredient - pick from your active ingredients
   • Quantity - how much goes in one batch
   • Unit - the unit for that quantity; it must be in the same family as the ingredient’s base unit (grams for a kilogram ingredient, millilitres for a litre ingredient, and so on)
   • Waste % - trimming, peeling or spillage loss, from 0 to 100. Use 0 if there is none
7. Click “Create Recipe”

A recipe needs at least one ingredient line. After saving you land on the recipe page with its cost breakdown.

Yield Quantity

Yield turns a batch cost into a per-portion cost. If a recipe makes one dish, leave it at 1. If a batch of soup makes 12 bowls, set it to 12 and Cost per Portion becomes the batch cost divided by 12. For a prep ingredient, yield is in the ingredient’s base unit: a dough recipe that makes 2.5 kg of a kilogram-based ingredient has a yield of 2.5.

Sub-recipes (Prep Ingredients)

To cost a dish that uses something you make yourself:

1. Add the prepped item as an ingredient (for example “Pizza dough”, base unit Kilogram)
2. Create a recipe whose Output is that ingredient, listing flour, water, yeast and salt, with the batch’s yield in kilograms
3. In the pizza recipe, add a line for “Pizza dough” in grams

The dough’s cost per kilogram is now its recipe cost divided by its yield, and the pizza line is costed from that. Sub-recipes can nest as deep as you need, and allergens follow the same path: gluten declared on the flour reaches the pizza through the dough.

How Cost Is Calculated

Each ingredient line costs: quantity, converted into the ingredient’s base unit × (1 + Waste %) × cost per base unit. The recipe cost is the sum of its lines.

The cost per base unit of an ingredient is found in this order, and the first available source is used:

1. Its own recipe (for a prep ingredient) - recipe cost divided by yield
2. Its preferred supplier price - the pack price from Suppliers → Manage SKUs, divided by the pack size converted into the ingredient’s base unit (Purchasing only)
3. Its Cost field
4. None - the ingredient has no cost basis

If any ingredient anywhere in the recipe tree has no cost basis, the whole recipe is treated as uncosted rather than shown as a partial total.

The Cost & Margin Panel

The recipe page shows a Cost & Margin card:

• Recipe Cost - the cost of one full batch
• Cost per Portion - Recipe Cost divided by Yield Quantity
• Gross Profit - the output variant’s current menu price minus Cost per Portion
• Gross Margin - Gross Profit as a percentage of the menu price

Gross Profit and Gross Margin only appear when the output is a menu item; a prep ingredient has no selling price, so a prep recipe shows Recipe Cost and Cost per Portion only.

”Cannot calculate”

A recipe shows Cannot calculate in the list and on its page, with the message “This recipe cannot be costed — one or more ingredient lines use a unit that cannot be converted against the ingredient’s stock unit”, when any of the following is true:

• A line’s unit is in a different family from the ingredient’s base unit - for example 200 g against an ingredient whose base unit is Bottle. Weight, volume and count units never convert across families, and count units (Unit, Carton, Box, Pack, Bottle, Piece) do not convert to each other
• An ingredient in the tree has no cost basis - no recipe, no preferred supplier price and a blank Cost field
• An ingredient on a line has been deleted

To fix it, Edit the recipe and correct the unit or replace the deleted ingredient, or give the ingredient a cost. Cost per Portion and Margin show ”—” until then.

The Recipes List

Menu → Recipes shows every recipe with:

• Output Product - the menu item or prep ingredient it produces
• Yield
• Ingredients - the number of lines, for example “4 ingredients”
• Cost - batch cost, or Cannot calculate
• Cost / Portion
• Margin - Gross Margin, or ”—” for prep recipes and uncosted recipes
• Actions - the edit button

Click a row to open the recipe page, which also lists each line’s Ingredient, Quantity, Unit and Waste %, and the Output SKU if set.

Editing and Deleting

To edit, open the recipe and click Edit, change the output, yield, notes or lines, and click Save Changes. You can switch the output between a menu item and a prep ingredient, as long as the new output does not already have a recipe.

To delete, open the recipe and click Delete, then confirm in the Delete Recipe dialog. Deleting a recipe does not delete its ingredients or change the product. If it was a prep recipe, that ingredient falls back to its supplier price or Cost field.

FAQs

Does the recipe cost update the Cost field on my product?

No. The Cost field on a product or variant (shown when your plan includes Purchasing) is typed by hand and is kept separate. Recipe costing lives on the recipe and is read from your ingredients; TypeMenu does not copy it into the product.

Can two menu items share one recipe?

No. Each variant has its own recipe. For a variable product with Small and Large sizes, create a recipe for each. If they share a base, make the base a prep ingredient with its own recipe and use it in both. There is no spreadsheet import; recipes are created one at a time through Add Recipe.

Related

• Ingredients - units, costs and allergen review
• Products - the menu items recipes are attached to
• Suppliers - supplier SKUs, pack sizes and preferred prices
• Allergen App - how recipe allergens reach the public allergen page