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. There's two methods of doing this. The first is scaling by batch size. In this case, if you have a recipe for Oatmeal Cookies, you can easily halve it, double it, triple it, and so on. The second is scaling by package size. In this case, you can convert your Oatmeal Cookie recipe to packages of 4 oz, 8 oz, 10 oz, and so on.

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

How It Works

Scale by Batch Size - we scale the ingredients and number of packages by the scaling factor, but assume the net weight per package, serving size, number of servings in each package stays the same.

Scale by Package Size - we adjust the net weight per package and scale the servings per container and number of packages accordingly, but assume the ingredient quantities and serving size 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 for a batch size scaling, doubling "Oatmeal Cookies" will give you "Oatmeal Cookies (copy) 2x" as the name for the new scaled recipe. And for a package size scaling, going from 4 oz to 8 oz will give you "Oatmeal Cookies (copy) 8 oz".

Caveat: How Recipe Costing Is Scaled

On the recipe costing side, if you scale by batch size, the unit costs all stay the same, but we DO scale the batch 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, from your "Recipe Dashboard" each of your recipes will have an "Actions" dropdown menu with the option to "Scale" a recipe. Or if your in a recipe, select the "More" dropdown and "Scale". From there, you can choose your method, enter any scaling factor, 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.