For quite some time you've been able to copy your recipes so that you don't have to build similar recipes from scratch every time.

A pain point we've heard from chefs and food manufacturers is the difficulty of quickly coming up with all the measurements and quantities for a larger batch of a particular recipe.

What It Is

To answer the rally cry, we built a new feature that puts a little twist on copying a recipe. Instead of copying a recipe exactly, it allows you to scale your recipe to a different size. So, if you have a recipe for Oatmeal Cookies, you can easily halve it, double it, triple it, and so on.

This is all part of our plan to keep making great, simple food business software.

How It Works

What happens when you do this is that we automatically increase the amount of each ingredient by the scaling factor. On the recipe level, we scale the yield and number of packages, but not the number of servings per package (we assume this stays the same).

How The Name Changes

The name is automatically changed as we append the scaling factor to the end of the name, so doubling "Oatmeal Cookies" will give you "Oatmeal Cookies 2x" as the name for the new scaled recipe.

Caveat: How Recipe Costing Is Scaled

On the recipe costing side, the unit costs all stay the same for each ingredient, but we DO scale the packaging, labor, and overhead costs linearly. Labor and overhead costs probably don't exactly grow linearly in reality - you probably save some time and effort when doing a larger batch. So, be aware that if you did the costing for a recipe that you're scaling, you probably want to take a look at the new recipe costs after scaling the recipe.

Other than that caveat, this feature should really help food manufacturers and chefs scale their recipes faster than ever.

Where To Find It

If you're interested in playing around with this feature, click on the "My Recipes" link once you're signed in and each of your recipes will have a dropdown menu option to "Scale" a recipe. You can enter any scaling factor there and voila!

Let us know what you think if you get to use this feature and, as always, let us know your thoughts and feedback as we continue to improve our service.