Note: If you are using Square, Toast, or Heartland POS, please see this article
What is a recipe?
Building recipes in MarketMan is allowing you to cost your items to the gram and ml of each ingredient you're using to make them. Menu items are the final dishes you serve, so every time you sell an item MarketMan keeps track of all those grams and milliliters for you to check them in many reports.
To build the recipes- just like in real life, where we're starting by collecting the ingredients we need for the making of a dish, you should start by setting up your sub-recipes and preparations.
You should also merge ALL of your items that need merging before starting the work on recipes.
Why should I use it?
1. To understand the accurate costing for each dish and track that percentage with the ever-changing prices of your inventory items
2. Run advanced reports for actual usage vs theoretical (desired) usage
HOW TO - Step by Step
- Go to "Inventory" > "Menu items" (if you have multiple locations, do this in HQ!)
If your POS is connected to MarketMan, you'll see your buttons from the POS as separate lines here.
Every item or modification will have its own line. - Click on any item to open the recipe sidebar
- Start by adding a category - these will help us a lot later on when we'll look at reports.
At this point, you should also see your retail price coming directly from your POS system or sales upload. - Under "Ingredients" start by clicking on "+ Add ingredient" and in the search box type in the item name.
MarketMan will bring up the items in this order:
- Inventory items (purchase)
- Menu items
- Sub recipes / Preparations
Make sure to select the correct item! You should always use a purchase or sub/prep.
If at this point you see multiple purchase options coming up for the same item, you should merge them first! - On the QTY part - you can change the UOM as needed based on the way you buy/make this item.
MarketMan supports the conversions within a UOM family.
So if you're buying your item in ml - you'll be able to use it with any volume UOM you'd like. If you buy an item in lbs - you'll be able to use any weight UOM in the recipes. EA would stay Each.
If you buy an item in volume UOM, you'll be able to use any volume UOM, and additional UOMs such as cups, tbsp, tsp.
MarketMan also offers a conversion of EA/weight to cups, tbsp, tsp.
(You can see a further explanation about it in this article- What UOMs MarketMan offers?) - At this point, you also have the ability to toggle back and forth to an inventory item and make changes to that item if necessary by clicking the Edit item button. For example: change the UOM, packaging information, or item name.
- Once all ingredients are listed, MarketMan will calculate the Total recipe cost, Food cost percentage, and individual item cost based on current item pricing!
You'll also see this price and percentage on the menu profitability report! - Under the "Procedure" tab you can a picture of this item, Prep Time and Cook Time, along with cooking instructions and any notes!
Check more about it on the Cookbook article
Mastering this feature- How to build recipes for items with modifiers
If you're using modifiers, keep that in mind when building recipes:
- Modifiers are like parts of a puzzle - every click on the POS adds or removes an ingredient from the final puzzle.
Example: If a customer asks for "no onion" on their burger, you save on the food cost by not using onion. We want to track that! - Start by building your menu items- these are brought in either from your POS or your sales upload so the names will match exactly!
In the ingredients, you'll add everything that always comes with this dish. The things that you can't customize.
Example: If I'm selling a pizza and customers can choose the type of cheese and different toppings:
- I'll add to the menu item "pizza" everything that's not cheese or toppings.
Dough, sauce, spices, oil, etc
- I'll then move to step 3 to build the modifiers separately. - Search for your modifiers. They will be the same as what you have them named in your POS or on your sales upload.
Example: When adding cheese to my pizza recipe, search for items with the name "Mozzarella" or "Swiss", not necessarily "cheese".
Make use of categories - they're going to help you a LOT!
Extra tips - from the experts!
- The order of recipe ingredients can be customized to the order in which you use them!
Example: First ingredient is dough, then sauce, then cheese.
Open up your menu item recipe and click the sort icon to enable drag and re-arrange the ingredients - Use the menu profitability report to help you prioritize your recipe building.
Start with the items you sell the most, and work down - Work in groups/categories. Start with "appetizers" and then go to "sides", for example.
For each group, start by creating the sub-recipes/preps, then the menu items, then the modifiers.
Don't forget to categorize everything properly so you can analyze the results easily. - If you're still filling the account with info, try working with 2 screens - one for the items and one on the recipes. This will help you work faster.
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