Best practice working with products and recipes
Products and recipes defined
Product are sellable articles with a price, size, article number, and name according to regulation and trade standards.
Recipe is a list of ingredients and their quantities needed for a particular recipe size. When creating a recipe, we don't know the product's unit size, sales price, or other product related information. However, the recipe may be a source of such information, like the ingredient list and allergen content.
A product can only exist together with a recipe, but recipes can exist without a product. A recipe can be used as an ingredient in other recipes. Thus, several levels of recipes may be part of one product.
How to best structure your products and recipes
- Structure your recipes in accordance with how you produce your products. If the product consists of several semi-finished products that you produce in separate production operations, create each of these as separate recipes. Learn more about semi-finished products by clicking here.
- Make use of product variants as long as the products share the same identical recipe. Start a guided tour for creating product variants by clicking here (Requires Food Declaration Pro).
- Avoid making your products and recipes too complicated. Even though our system allows you endless levels and parallell structures of sub-recipes in one product, it is not given that your company users will be able to manage and comprehend complex recipe structures.
Options for structuring products and recipes
Let's dive into the options for working with products and recipes in MyFoodOffice. Some of the options are only available for Food Declaration Pro license.
| Type | Use | Standard | Pro |
| Product | A product can be sold under its name or article number. Each product has its unique recipe that works independently of other products. Every product must be connected to a recipe, which can be either an existing recipe or a new blank recipe that you can fill out. | ✔ | ✔ |
| Product variant | Product variants are products that share the same recipe. For instance, Bread and Sliced Bread share the same recipe. Instead of duplicating recipes, each variant is connected to the same recipe in MyFoodOffice. | ✔ | |
| Cloned product | Cloned products are made out of existing products in your account. Once cloned, the new product has its own recipe, and editing it will not affect the original recipe. | ✔ | ✔ |
| Semi-finished product | Let's say you make a filling to be used in some baked goods or cakes. It is produced separately and stocked. You solve this by creating a recipe. Once created, it can be used as an ingredient in other recipes, thus becoming a sub-recipe. | ✔ | ✔ |
| Recipe | A recipe can be connected to a product, but it does not need to. A recipe can be the very first draft of a new product idea you have, that you iterate over and test out. A recipe can also be used as an ingredient in other recipes, thus becoming a sub-recipe. | ✔ | ✔ |
| Cloned recipe | A cloned, or copied, recipe is made out of an existing recipe in your account. Once cloned, the cloned recipe works independently of the original recipe you made the clone from. Also, the cloned recipe does not have any products connected to it. | ✔ | |
| Merchandise | Merchandise is an alternative to product when creating articles. Merchandise does not have a recipe. This means that any product information has to be filled out manually. This feature is available for B2B Sales users. | ||
| Ingredient | Ingredients are used in recipes. | ✔ | ✔ |