Recipe Management Software

When you look for recipe management software, you should understand the importance of managing recipes and choose a system that works for your restaurant. Find software that easily stores, retrieves, and organizes recipes, is tailored to restaurants, and calculates your recipe food costs. In this page, we will discuss how to manage and organize your recipes, benefits of the right recipe management software, what to look for, and an overview of MarketMan as a complete solution.

What is Recipe Management?

Recipe management is the process of standardizing recipes for menu items, as well as managing the associated food costs. For a restaurant to succeed, it's important to monitor your recipes, ensure that they are consistent across multiple employees and locations, and control ingredient costs for each dish. Managing, creating, and adjusting recipes is crucial for a restaurant to lower costs and maximize profits.

How to Organize Your Recipes

The first step towards effectively managing your recipes is finding a good way to organize your recipes. If you have disorganized recipes, your production process slows down as kitchen workers scramble to search for the right way to make dishes. When recipes aren't easily accessible, you lose time, labor, and money in the back-of-house. And if you don't have standard recipes written down, your business can't operate when key chefs aren't there. Your dishes are not consistently made, which affects your brand reputation and customer satisfaction.

There are many ways to organize and increase the visibility of your recipes. You can separate and log your recipes by categories, such as by main ingredients or batch of ingredients (meat, fish, vegetables, pasta), or by groups on your menu (appetizers, comfort foods, entrees, desserts, etc.). The next step is finding the best place to store your recipes for easy access.

Recipe Organizer Tools

There are many different methods and tools that restaurant owners, managers, and chefs can use to organize, store, and manage their recipes.

You can resort to Excel, paper binders, and notecards to store recipes. However, paper solutions are easily misplaced, costly, and not secure. It also takes time to fumble through binders and stacks of paper to locate the recipe you need at any given moment. Paper can't be easily updated and shared across your organization. Paper and Excel solutions also don't give you real-time and automated food cost calculations.

You can use some simple organizational tools or recipe management apps or recipe websites. Some apps or sites allow you to record, store, and retrieve recipes and give you the ability to convert web and print recipes to text. Some apps give you features such as the ability to create a shopping or grocery list, make a meal plan, and provide the nutritional value of each dish. However, your average recipe app or site has limited functionality, is usually tailored for individuals instead of restaurants, and does not offer recipe costing capabilities to calculate food costs.

Finally, you can use a full-fledged restaurant management software solution such as MarketMan, which contains a recipe management system. This gives you a secure central repository to store your recipe data and an automation system to calculate your food costs for each meal. You can easily find and locate recipes with search and filter capabilities. And you can monitor your food costs to ensure your recipe ingredients don't cut into your margins and your menu items remain profitable.

Think of it as a living cookbook, where recipes can be stored and updated, and inventory can be tracked in real time.

Benefits of a Recipe Management System

There are many more benefits to choosing recipe management software and having an effective system:

• Protect confidential information: Your recipe collection is unique and perhaps you would like to keep them a secret. With a cloud-based system, your recipes are stored in a secure environment. Even if your files are stolen or found by a third party, your information is password protected and can't be accessed without permissions.
• Ensure brand consistency: Recipe deployment and production is easy with a recipe management solution. Multi-unit chains can share recipes and standardize them easily through one central recipe database. A recipe management system ensures that product quality and taste is consistent across different locations and chefs. This increases your customer satisfaction and brand loyalty. Customers know to expect the same great culinary experience every time they visit.
• Create standard processes: With recipe software, the same processes are used to prepare your food every time. So if you are missing key chefs or employees, you still have the information to keep your business operating without interruption. And standard prep times keeps production and batch processes at all your restaurants streamlined, thereby increasing your table turnover.
• Stay compliant: A good solution will allow you to store allergen information for each ingredient and recipe, which helps you stay compliant with allergen guidelines and be transparent with your customers.
• Help with inventory management: When you use software to manage your recipes, your inventory control is more accurate through real-time updates. You are able to streamline your inventory management process and reduce food costs.
• Minimize wastage: A central solution indicates the amount of raw material needed for your recipes. Since you have standard ingredient quantities, you know just the right amount of inventory stock to order and can minimize waste.
• Update recipes easily: When you have feedback on certain raw materials in your dishes, you'll want to change ingredients and update your recipes. Recipe management software allows you to quickly and easily change recipe parameters for a single or multiple recipes or make a new recipe across all your locations in just one click.

Recipe Management Software: What to Look For

When searching for the right software solution for your business, you'll want to find one that is accurate, reliable, and easy to use. The best solution will contain all the benefits described above.

You want to search for an intuitive software solution that is easy to learn with excellent support staff. You also want to find a solution that is granular and flexible with your units of measurement, automatically translates quantities for you, and calculates your food costs through recipe costing software, also known as food costing software.

Finally, you want to look for a solution that has inventory management, procurement, and other capabilities, and is integrated with your accounting and POS systems. You will then have one seamless back-of-house system for your restaurant.

MarketMan - Your Complete Recipe Management Solution

MarketMan is the industry's ideal solution for managing recipes, containing all the benefits described above and more. Here are some of the features that MarketMan offers as a recipe manager:

Recipe Costing and Management

MarketMan gives you a complete item-by-item cost breakdown for each dish on your menu, allowing you to develop recipes that work with your budget. This breakdown can be sorted and filtered. You can also record sub-recipes and preparations- recipe in recipe in recipe.

You can check recipe costs in real-time, identify costly ingredients, receive notifications when menu items become unprofitable, and integrate price tracking for raw materials from your vendors. With MarketMan, you have a top-to-bottom understanding of what your plate costs are and can determine how to reduce food costs. You can be much more proactive about managing your margins and keeping food costs for finished goods in line with your targets.

You can calculate and itemize plate costs that drive actionable results, receive valuable insights that provide visibility, and determine menu pricing to reduce waste and food costs.

Cookbook

MarketMan's cookbook is a central hub that lists all ingredients, portion sizes, cooking instructions, and images for each recipe on your menu. Once you build or import recipes into MarketMan, they will be automatically populated into your cookbook. The cookbook is accessible across all devices. You can also do responsive search and filter by category to easily find the recipe you need. The cookbook serves as a powerful reference tool.

The cookbook also contains a printable training manual for processes and presentations. It includes a description, ingredients, procedures, prep times, allergens, and images for each dish. It can be used for employee education and training, to manage portion sizes, standardize recipes and procedures, and eliminate product variations across your enterprise, and serve as a single central repository for menu management.

The cookbook organizes recipes in a clear, easy-to-follow way, gives your kitchen all the information they need, and creates consistency your customers can rely on.

Allergen Management

MarketMan's allergen tool provides easy traceability of allergens for each meal on your menu. It allows you to tag and denote which ingredients and menu items contain (or may contain) specific allergens. Once indicated on the product level, allergen information is synced across all dishes that use that item, and is populated in the cookbook. For example, you can add a "dairy" tag to cheese so that whenever cheese shows up in a recipe, the allergen will be associated with it. Users may also limit who can edit allergen info with permissions.

The allergen tool provides accountability, compliance (especially with EU standards), and transparency, safety, and responsibility for your customers.

All in all, MarketMan is the best choice for you to manage your recipes and food costs. And MarketMan does more than just manage your recipes. It's a full life-cycle inventory management software that automates a restaurant's back-of-house processes and is integrated with accounting and POS systems. It contains food costing capabilities, inventory management, vendor management, receiving and ordering, invoice scanning, dynamic reports, and more. Schedule a demo today to learn more about how MarketMan can help your restaurant.