The Ultimate Recipe Manager: Ingredients, Labor, and Margins

As covered earlier in this blog series, before starting Sous Chef, we had a catering company called 2Forks.

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Growing pains

In 2016, with the help of our Orders Today sheet, things were going pretty well at 2Forks. We had growing partnerships with some of the biggest names in town including ZeroCater, Eat Club, and Zesty (now DoorDash), to name a few. We focused on vegan and vegetarian menus, which were in short supply at scale, and demand was growing every month.

Some menus were a hit, others not so much. So we had to keep developing new recipes to stay relevant, which is arguably one of the best parts of working in corporate catering: developing menus, tasting them with the team, adjusting them, and talking about the flavors, textures, and colors. It really brings out the creativity in everyone and builds team rapport.

But inevitably, the party pooper speaks up: “How much does this cost?” That usually ended up being my contribution to the menu development process because I love spreadsheets, and I had to make certain that we could delight our customers and continue to stay in business.

The devil is in the details

Accurately costing out a recipe is no trivial task:

• We had to pore through recent invoices or call suppliers to figure out current ingredient prices. We didn’t want outdated prices that would lead to incorrect costing.
• Then we had to determine the yield of each ingredient in the recipe, because the loss from raw ingredient to prepped ingredient can significantly impact the cost of a dish.
• Next, we had to measure every single ingredient that goes into the recipe, which we usually did by weight.
• Finally, we had to measure the final weight of the finished dish—the final yield.

Assembling the pieces of the recipe puzzle

At the time, this process required lots of printouts, measurements, scribbled notes, food-stained papers, and repeated effort by our chef because something got lost in the mix. Then he would hand me a stack of semi-complete papers and I had to translate all these documents into a spreadsheet to combine the measurements with the ingredients and prices from our suppliers to eventually figure out the cost of a new dish.

It was every bit as painful as it sounds, if not more.

Building a flexible system: ingredients and recipes

Finally, we started getting smart about it. We created a central place where we would record all ingredient prices, case weights, and yields from our suppliers—we called this the “Master Price List.” Then we figured out how to connect these ingredients and prices into a recipe-costing spreadsheet that would enable our team to quickly enter ingredient weights and get real-time pricing. We saved so much time and sanity, it’s hard to imagine doing it any other way today.

Even better was the next chapter of this story: automating the weekly ingredient shopping list. Not only would we gain back a huge chunk of time from calculating ingredient needs, but we would simultaneously minimize waste, all thanks to the recipe management system.

Seamless recipe management

With Sous Chef we integrated this ecosystem of ingredients directly into recipe creation. Sous Chef also enabled us to add labor costing per recipe and figure out menu pricing based on a desired gross profit margin. This enabled chefs to save time on menu development and get a clear picture of dish profitability.

Our chef could manage dish development from ingredients to flavors to costs; fortunately, I still got invited to tastings.

Automating the daily shopping list

Continue reading how 2Forks streamlined operations in Automated Shopping Lists: Our Kitchen’s Biggest Time Saver.