Recipes & Food Cost

Attach a costed, scalable recipe to a menu item and Puree works out its food cost and margin for you — and keeps it current as ingredient prices move.

Recipes Belong to Menu Items

A recipe in Puree is the costed build behind a dish your customer sees, so it’s attached to a menu item. Open any menu item’s edit page and you’ll find a Recipe panel with a Link a recipe button that starts the item’s recipe. You can also manage all recipes from Logistics → Recipes. Each item holds one recipe. The step-by-step guide is Adding a Recipe.

Building a Recipe

Add ingredients from your library with the quantity each needs. As you build it, the food cost updates live. For each line you can record optional notes and a waste allowance, and the recipe as a whole can carry a method — turning it into a genuine kitchen card, not just a costing sheet.

You can also import a recipe you already have, from pasted text, a web page, a photo or a document, then tidy the ingredients and quantities to match how you actually make it. See Importing Your Recipes. Puree AI can also draft a recipe from a description, estimate ingredient costs and detect dietary codes and allergens: see Using AI to Help.

Components Shared Between Dishes

A sauce, stock, dough or filling can be written once as a component and used as a line in any number of recipes. Its cost rolls into each of them and re-rolls when it changes, and shopping lists, allergens and dietary checks look inside it. See the Components section of Adding a Recipe.

Base Yield and Scaling

Every recipe has a base yield — “makes 50 canapés” or “serves 10”. Puree can scale the recipe to whatever batch an event needs: quantities and total cost recalculate proportionally, so a recipe written once works for a dinner for 8 and a wedding for 280.

Food Cost and Margin

Once an item has a recipe, Puree shows its food cost (total ingredient cost) and, against the item’s selling price, your margin. On the menu items list, menu-category items gain a Cost column so you can scan your whole range at a glance. Under each figure it says where the cost came from: recipe, manual (a cost typed on the item) or contents (a bundle, added up from what it holds).

Margins are colour-coded so problems stand out — healthy reads green, thin reads amber, a loss-maker reads red. Because the cost is derived from your ingredient library, the day a supplier price moves, every dish using that ingredient re-costs automatically.

A Recipe Cost or Your Own Figure

An item can have a recipe and a cost typed on it as well, under Manual cost assessment on the item. They are alternatives, never added together: Puree uses whichever was set more recently. Type a cost after the recipe was last costed and your figure is used; change the recipe, or let a supplier price list move one of its ingredients, and the recipe takes over again. The item shows which one is in use and when the recipe was last costed. Clear the typed cost to go straight back to the recipe.

Bundles Have No Recipe of Their Own

A bundle (a menu item made of other catalogue items, such as a platter or a boxed lunch) is a wrapper, so the recipe and the cost live on its contents. Bundles are left out of the recipes list and out of the “no recipe” and margin health filters on the items list, so a lunch box is never flagged as an uncosted dish. Cost the sandwiches and the cookies instead, and prep lists, shopping lists and the consolidated item view will all count them in real quantities. See our Items & Categories help page for setting a bundle up.

A Bonus for AI Photos

If you generate AI images for your menu, a linked recipe makes them better: the ingredients and method feed into the image prompt, so a generated photo reflects what’s actually in the dish, not just its name. See our article Allergens: Flag What Each Menu Item Contains, Separate from Dietary Codes and the AI Image Generation help topic for related settings.

New to the feature? Start with the Ingredients Library topic, then come back here. For the full overview see our article Recipes, Ingredients & Food Cost: Know Exactly What Every Dish Costs You.