Finished vs Semi-Finished Recipes in a Central Kitchen: How to Classify Component Recipes So Cost and Stock Depletion Stay Accurate

Start Here: Do You Make This Component to Store It, or to Serve It?

The fastest way to classify a central kitchen recipe is one question: do you produce it in batches to hold and issue later, or do you assemble it to order and serve straight away? A component you make ahead and store - a sauce, a stock, a dough, a par-cooked protein - is a semi-finished recipe, and it should be tracked as stock. A dish that is plated and served on the spot is a finished recipe, and it depletes its ingredients at the point of sale instead.

That single distinction is where most central kitchen onboarding goes wrong. Operators see a long list of prep items and reach for "finished" because the batch is, in a plain-English sense, finished cooking. But in inventory terms "finished" means the opposite of what a stored component needs. Answer the store-or-serve question first, and the rest of the setup follows from it.

Why a Miscategorised Prep Recipe Stops Depleting Component Stock

Here is the mechanism that breaks. When you mark a semi-finished component as stockable, the system creates a tracked inventory item for it, restricts its production to the locations you have enabled, and updates every parent recipe that uses it. Logging a production batch then deducts the raw ingredients from live stock and adds the finished component to stock at the central kitchen. As outlets consume it, the component depletes.

Mark that same component as a finished, non-stockable recipe and none of that happens. No tracked item is created, so producing it never adds component stock, and outlets drawing on it never deplete anything. Take a house sauce batched at 20 kg for a batch cost of 48.00. If six outlets pull 120 g per dish across 240 covers a day, that is 28.8 kg leaving the central kitchen daily that the system never records as gone. Over a month it is roughly 864 kg of phantom component that shows as still on hand when the shelf is empty.

How One Wrong Setting Skews Cost in Every Recipe Above It

The cost damage is quieter but larger. A correctly set semi-finished recipe carries its real production cost - the batch cost spread across the actual yield, grossed up for prep wastage - into every outlet recipe that uses it. At 2.40 per kg, a dish using 120 g of the component carries 0.29 of component cost, and that number reflects what the kitchen actually consumed.

When the component is non-stockable, its cost is applied by recipe rate rather than tracked as a real stock movement, so production variance on that batch is never captured and the parent recipe's food cost drifts away from what the outlet actually spent. One mis-set component quietly carries about 2,074 a month of phantom stock value on the books, and because it feeds several plated dishes, the error repeats in every recipe above it. This is a direct contributor to the gap between theoretical and actual food cost that variance reviews spend hours chasing.

Matching the Recipe Type to the Job: Stockable, Non-Stockable, and Plated

There are three recipe types and each one is correct for a specific job. A semi-finished, stockable recipe is for anything you produce ahead and hold: sauces, stocks, doughs, marinades, par-cooked bases, and the components a central kitchen ships to outlets. It becomes a tracked item, it is produced only at production-enabled locations, and it depletes as it is used.

A non-stockable recipe is for a build you cost but do not hold as inventory - a component assembled on demand where there is no batch sitting on a shelf to count. A plated dish is a finished menu item: it links to its point-of-sale item so a sale deducts the correct ingredients, including modifiers. The test is always the same store-or-serve question. If a batch physically waits in a fridge or on a rack between production and use, it is semi-finished and stockable, full stop. For the underlying setup of yields, prep wastage, and batch production, this all runs on Supy's recipe and inventory platform.

Which Branch Are You In? The One Setup Move for Each Case

Name your branch and make the one move it needs. If you make the component ahead and store it, set it as a semi-finished, stockable recipe and enable production at your central kitchen location - then run one test production batch and confirm the component appears as a tracked item whose stock rises on production and falls as outlets consume it. If the item is plated and served immediately, keep it a finished dish linked to its point-of-sale item so sales deplete its ingredients directly.

If you are not sure a component is set correctly right now, the fastest audit is that same test batch: produce a known quantity, then check whether the component's on-hand stock moved. If it did not move, it is mis-classified as finished, and every outlet recipe that uses it is carrying a cost and stock error today. Fixing the type is a one-time setup change that stops the drift at its source, before it reaches your central kitchen operations reporting.