What is Recipe Management? - Best Practices for Implementing
What is Recipe Management?
Recipe management is the process of standardizing recipes for menu items and calculating each item’s portions.
With Yellow Dog software, you can create standardized recipes that can be easily accessed by you and your staff on their own mobile devices.
Utilizing recipe management helps keep track of food costs, cost of goods sold, and cash flow through the scope of item inventory. Consistent recipes are what drive tracking and profitability!
How Recipe Management Works
When choosing a restaurant management software, you want to look for a software that accurately and efficiently stores, organizes, and retrieves your recipes tailored to your restaurant. Yellow Dog software offers a cloud based recipe management software that caters to your restaurant's specific inventory needs.
Let’s take a simple recipe like a cheeseburger. Maybe your restaurant’s cheeseburger is a bun, cheddar cheese, lettuce, tomato, onion, pickles, and a burger patty you make in house.
You wouldn’t want your Prep Cooks to work without an exact recipe – too much salt, too much garlic, and not enough pepper – small changes that are going to affect the taste of the burger.
Now let’s go back to the finished cheeseburger – an extra pickle, 4 oz of cheese instead of 2 oz, two pieces of lettuce – small changes that are going to affect the COST of the burger.
Those small changes might only be costing you cents on the dollar, but when you multiply that by how many burgers you sell in a year, that cost adds up. Let’s say those minor changes – too much cheese, too much lettuce, one extra pickle – only cost you $0.10 cents per burger. You sell 100 burgers a day – that’s $10 every day you’re losing by not consistently following a singular recipe! $10 a day might not sound like a lot, but that’s $70 every week and multiply that by 52 weeks – that’s $3640 a year!
Benefits of Recipe Management
More Accurate & Current Inventory Data - A recipe management system keeps track of all items and updates their costs with each invoice. The system should also connect to your POS to update item On Hands each time they’re sold. This prevents losing track of inventory.
Saving Labor Hours - Having standard recipes already stored, calculated and easily accessible prevents time scrambling to figure out the right way to make dishes. It also saves you hours later when you’re trying to calculate the cost of goods sold (COGS). Read our COGS guide here.
Minimize Waste - Having the exact measurement for recipes prevents guessing and going over the amount of ingredients needed.
More Accurate Reporting - An operation that uses Recipe Management has deep insights into where their profits and losses come from. Yellow Dog has standardized and customizable reporting that will help you take action on those insights. By linking your recipes in YD to your point of sale, you can begin to see actual vs. theoretical reporting.
Best Practices for Utilizing Recipe Management
Utilize Your System’s Tools to the Fullest
Make sure you are familiar with all the tools at your disposal. With Yellow dog, all employees can be allowed access to your digital recipe book on mobile. You can add images for visual representation (videos too!) and input precise instructions. These are all tools to maximize your recipe management. Does your system automatically calculate and convert? Look into one that does.
Train all personnel properly
When all personnel are properly trained, the operation goes smoothly and accuracy prevents time lost.
Set a specific time to input recipe data
Choosing a specific recurring time and day ensures that data will get done. Doing things on a specific date also makes backtracking easier.
Put in the work
To get maximum benefit from Recipe Management, your team has to put in the work up front. Your recipes - the ones you choose to track - need to be accurate. We promise it will pay dividends.
Sometimes…less can be more
Tracking only your top 10 most impactful dishes through recipe management is better than tracking no dishes. Pick a reasonable plan and follow through.
Automate your reporting right to your inbox
Want insights delivered to you at the right time? Automate! This saves you time in the long run and keeps the information right at your fingertips.
Interested in getting your restaurant on track through recipe management? Check out Yellow Dog’s inventory solutions for restaurants.