What is Recipe Manager?

Recipe Manager is a powerful application for recipe data management. It is not only a tool for tracking detailed recipe data, but it also provides accurate ingredient / recipe cost control and nutrition analysis. It has many powerful capabilities and comes bundled with many reports ideal for chefs, catering companies, independent product producers, and reataurant management alike to keep tabs on the fast pace food service industry. It can be integrated into a number of leading Point-of-Sale / Service applications on the market today.

For more information about Recipe Manager product specifics please read our About page.

Why we developed Recipe Manager?

Recipe Manager was originally written in 2001 to address a number of short-comings in other similar products on the market.

1· Other systems were lacking reliable or simple nutrition label generation for food products (each time USDA changes anything it was a complex task to change the labels IF it was even possible).
2· Other systems were lacking reliable ingredient-level and sub-recipe cost tracking (when bundling recipes inside other recipes, calculation accuracy for costing and nutrition would suffer).
3· Other systems had inadequate order tracking (Purchase Orders) capabilities and/or were usually not interfaceable with major market point-of-sale systems.
4· Other systems had nonstandard user Interfaces - no Microsoft standards were adopted making it difficult to learn for Chefs and other restaurant staff.
5· Other systems did not incorporate the way Chefs work (for example, most systems displayed ingredient portions in difficult-to- use decimals instead of fractional values).
6· Other systems did not allow for much custom reporting - you were not allowed to do much more than change report column headings or titles. Building your own own set of reports with custom database queries was out of the question.

Recipe Manager does ALL THIS and more!!

What will Recipe Manager provide for me and my business?

Cost and nutrition control!

Until now, there has never been a low-cost alternative to having a full time Nutritionalist on staff. Recipe Manager gives you the capability of simply entering ingredient data received from your vendor, and it handles the rest! It comes bundled with a huge list of FDA/USDA standard conversions in order to calculate costs and do nutritional analyses for you. This allows you to quickly scale an entire recipe and print out a detail sheet, pictures of the dish, any attached documents, a nutrition label, a cost analysis sheet, or an unlimited number of your own custom reports! Recipe Manager is really an invaluable tool for total recipe data control.

How does the system work?

Recipe Manager is a database management system (DBMS) that is interfaceable with your current information technology (IT) systems.

You enter your ingredients first based on your vendor orders. For each ingredient ordered, you will need to enter the nutrition element details (cholesterol, calories, fats, vitamin content, etc.) provided to you from the vendor.

The nutrition element values that are MOST important are highlighted in red in the ingredient. These are the elements that are on the nutrition label.

That’s it! Now, simply add the ingredient into any recipe. The nutrition and cost information will be imported, converted to the proper units, and scaled accordingly to provide you with all the detail you need for the complete recipe.

Simply enter the “Nutrition” tab to generate a nutrition label as shown below…

Enter the “Costs” tab for a per-portion and complete cost analysis of the recipe, add pictures under the “Picture” tab, add important document attachments in the “Attachments” tab, or view/edit your own custom fields under the “Custom” tab.

Now, you can take it a step further and add this recipe into a custom menu. You can then further analyze your data by the entire menu!

How easy is the system to use?

Extremely. We have designed the system with the end user in mind. We know the users of this system are general food service staff and managers who’s specialty is not computers. The system was designed with keyboard shortcuts, an full on-line manual, a tutorial, and tooltips throughout the system to ensure you always have the help you need.

How are reports generated?

Reports may be generated from any screen by clicking the PRINT button. There are a number of standard reports, but the system comes bundled with its own Report Designer which can be used to build your own custom reports with any custom fields you wish to track.

Can the system be utilized for marketing purposes?

Absolutely. You can print reports on reorders and determine which recipe products move the quickest, then base a marketing campaign around your most popular products. You can do a seasonal or trend analysis to see if there are certain slow or peak times of the year. You can do a query on all recipes with low carbohydrates, for example, to build a “Low Carb Menu” to capitalize on this Atkins Diet revolution! The possibilities are endless!

Networking concerns?

Each license of Recipe Manager is a SITE license. This means you can load the system on as many computers as you want at any given location. The system is designed for a single-restaurant site but can easily work in a large restaurant chain environment.

Check out our customer case study on how Piccadilly Cafeterias uses the system.

Security concerns?

Important recipe data can be locked into a “Read Only” mode. The restaurant staff will then be able to see all data but not modify anything. This mode of operation protects you company’s data.

This is generally how the system runs in a restaurant environment. There is a small local database that sits on a server PC at the restaurant location. Corporate or home office data is “pushed” down into a designated folder, and the system resynchronizes the data the next time it is loaded. Even though the system is running in “Read Only” mode, the individual restaurants can still enter their own recipes into a “local site” category that does not interfere with the corporate recipe database. This allows the restaurants to provide a simple local menu or specials that may not be offered at the corporate level.