Creating Recipes and Subrecipes

Overview

Entering your recipes into Bevager and Foodager allow you to cost out your recipes for menu engineering purposes, as well as match them to your POS buttons to get theoretical depletions. Once your POS buttons are matched you'll also be able to track your Theoretical Costs vs Sales by Recipe on the report of that name, and use various reports to ensure you're hitting your goal Cost % based on the cost of the ingredients. (See the POS Matching article for more information on matching recipes to POS buttons after creating your recipes.)

For Bevager, users you should use the Recipes page to create any multi-ingredient recipes you serve. To create single ingredient drinks (such as each shot you sell, different sized beer pours, wine by the glass/bottle, etc...) you can do this en masse using the Pours page. See the article on Pours for more information.

Menu Lists

If you have not yet set up your Menu Lists you will need to add at least one before creating any recipes. You can see the full article on Menu Lists here, though we've included a few steps to help you get started below.

Navigate to Recipes in the Navigation pane and Menu Lists from the sub-menu.
Select New Menu List.
Enter the name for the Menu List as well as a Cost % associated with the recipes that will be tied to the list.

Examples: Cocktails, Wine BTG, Appetizers, Entrees, Seasonal Menu, etc.

Tip: Typically you want to create Menu Lists based on the Cost % - if all your recipes have the same Cost % you may only need a few Menu Lists broken down by concepts (appetizers, mains, spirits, wines, etc…), but if you have different cost % for different recipes we recommend making separate menu lists to differentiate these.

Creating a Recipe

After creating your menu lists, navigate to Recipes in the Navigation pane and Recipes from the sub-menu.
Click the "+New Recipe" button, then select the Menu List associated with the new recipe and finally, give the recipe a name.

After creating the recipe, you will be taken to the recipe building page, where you can add items or other existing recipes (called Subrecipes) using the "+Add" button near the bottom left of the page.
Selecting individual items for your recipe will expand the "Add Item" page to include "Recipe Unit (RU) Size" as well as the drop-down selection for measurements.

If the item you select does not have conversion units entered against it you will see the yellow message like in the image above. To enter conversion units simply pull up the item (many users prefer to do this in a new tab) and enter the conversions on the Item tab of the item. Conversions are required if for instance you count an item by the "each" but want to use it in a recipe by a weight or volume - you will need to enter a conversion to weight or volume from the "each".

Example: For a Gin & Tonic, you would select 2 RU in oz for your Gin item, and 4 RU in oz for your Club Soda item.

Craftable will calculate the Recipe Unit (RU) Cost as well as the RU Cost % for you. The RU Cost is the total cost to your establishment of creating this recipe, based on the last purchased price of the ingredients, and the RU Cost % is what percentage of the total recipe cost each ingredient is.
You will be able to set the number of Servings using the Servings field. Below this, you’ll see the Serving Cost (what it costs you to serve this). The Cost %, Serving Price, and Final Price work as a three-way calculator - you can enter in your goal Cost % and the system will calculate your Serving Price and add in tax for your Final Price, or you can enter the pre-tax price into the Serving Price field and the system will calculate what the Cost % of the item is, as well as what it will be post-tax.

So in the example of the Ranch dressing, if we charge $1.00 if someone adds Ranch to a meal, this will cost the customer $1.08 post-tax, and we're getting a 9% cost % on this item.

Tip: Keep in mind: if you need to change your Tax rate you can do so by clicking your name at the top right of the screen, going to Store Settings > Store Info and changing the Tax %.

Using a Subrecipe as an ingredient

Any recipe is available to be used as a subrecipe within another recipe. For this reason when building out your menu we recommend starting to build the basic prep recipes first that will be the building blocks of your other recipes - any sauces, marinades, syrups, or other house-made items that will be used as building blocks within your other recipes.

Navigate to the Recipe that will be using a subrecipe.
Click the "+Add Subrecipe" button.
Start typing the name of the Recipe and select it.
Enter the RU Size used in this recipe.
Click "Add Subrecipe".

Throw Away Items

When you add an item to a recipe you will see a toggle for "Throw Away" - use this if the ingredient you're adding should not impact the total weight or volume of the recipe. Examples of this would be if you're adding packaging to a recipe, bones to make a broth (which will be thrown away), expensive ice cubes in a drink, or any other type of garnish.

By adding the item as an ingredient you're adding the cost so the system knows how much it actually costs you to produce the recipe, but you're indicating that the ingredient should not be used to calculate the total weight or volume of the recipe. (See the section titled Volume & Weight Calculations and Override Size below for more information on this.)

Base Items

Whether or not an item needs to be a Base Item is based on how your Modifiers are setup. This most frequently comes up for beverage programs, where a Modifier from your POS will modify a liquor to make a certain drink, and in doing so changes the original volume of the recipe.

For instance many bars will let you pick a drink and specify the liquor you want to have - for example "a gin and tonic with Hendricks". A typical pour of Hendricks might be 2oz, but if it's ordered in a gin and tonic at this bar the amount of the gin is decreased to 1.5oz, and 3.5oz of tonic water is added. This would be rung in on the POS by first selecting "Hendricks", and then modifying it with "Tonic". Within Bevager you would setup your generic Hendricks recipe as a 2oz pour, with the Hendricks indicated as the "Base Item".

You would then setup a Modifier Recipe for the Tonic which adds 3.5oz of tonic water, and also overrides the Base RU to be 1.5oz. Once both of these recipes are POS matched (both the recipe and the modifier recipe), this means when someone clicks "Hendricks" and modifies it with "Tonic" in the POS, the system will deplete 1.5oz of Hendricks, and 3.5oz of the tonic water. Please see the article titled Adding Modifiers for more information on building out your modifier menu.

Note: If you do not have a POS integration with Craftable you can ignore the "Base Item" setting as it only relates to the POS integration.

Unlinked Items

You may have certain ingredients that you want to add to a recipe that are not items on the system at all. For example "tap water" or even expensive ice cubes that you want to add to the cost of a drink, but don't track through the platform. You can add this to a recipe by typing an item name and not selecting something from the drop-down menu. When you do this the system will let you enter an optional conversion unit as well as an RU Cost for the ingredient. At the very bottom you also have the option to save it as a Non-Inventory Item for future use on the platform.

Once you've added an unlinked item to a recipe you will see an "Unlinked" tag against it. This indicates that the ingredient cannot be depleted from, as it does not have a running inventory count.

Volume & Weight Calculations and Override Size

Craftable will attempt to calculate the total weight or volume of your recipe, and you will be able to see this calculation at the bottom right of the recipe, below the total cost. The system is only able to calculate this value when every ingredient in the recipe has a conversion for that method of measurement. So if all items are counted by a volume measure or have a volume conversion, then the recipe will display an auto-calculated total Volume.

In the example below you can see that half the items have a Weight calculation (outlined in blue), and the other half of the items have a Volume calculation (outlined in green). As 100% of the items do not consistently have one of these, the system is not able to auto-calculate a total weight or volume for the recipe, which is why at the bottom right you can see both Volume and Weight are "0".

You can resolve this one of two ways:

1. If you want the system to auto-calculate for you, you should enter the missing conversion units against the item itself. For example if we want the recipe above to calculate by weight we should pull up the items "Mayonnaise Heavy Duty" and "Buttermilk Whole Refrigerated" and enter a weight conversion for them.

2. Alternatively, if you know what the total recipe yields and don't want to enter conversions against your items, you can override the recipe size. To do this, click the pencil icon to the left of the word Volume at the bottom right of your recipe.

This will open up the "Size Override" window where you can choose to override the auto-calculations of the recipe. Just toggle which (or both), enter a total yield size for the recipe, and click Save.

This functionality is particularly useful for any recipes where some of the liquid will burn off - even if the system is able to auto-calculate a volume for you, you may want to use the Size Override option to indicate what the total recipe yield is after it's been cooked down. The system will take this into account when calculating how much you'll end up with, but will use the actual RU Size of the ingredients for your depletions.

If needed, feel free to sign up for a Recipe Building Workshop if you would like more information.

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