Restaurant Recipe Management Software: Definition, Benefits, Features, & Challenges
- November 28, 2023
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Jean-Philippe Serhal
The secret to consistent profitability starts with efficient recipe management, which is heavily aided by recipe management software. Whether you’re launching a brand new restaurant or need to fix your operations to be back on track to profitability, producing consistent recipes is key to enhancing control over your business.
But what exactly is a recipe management software in the food industry, and how does it help restaurant operators maintain a tighter control over their business or profitability ?
This article dives into the features of restaurant recipe management solutions, their benefits and the results you may expect from them.
Table of Contents
1. What Are Restaurant Recipe Management Software?
Recipe management solves a long standing issue of ensuring consistency within a food business. Recipes delivered consistently not only increase customer satisfaction, but also help a business keep a tight control over their food cost, portions, menu performance, and profitability.
One of the reasons why hospitality businesses struggle in ensuring a consistent production of recipes is that recipes are nowhere to be found, are written down on a lost paper, or do not provide clear guidelines or preparation steps. This leads to chefs preparing recipes from memory rather than from a clear, easy to find guide, which affects the consistency of the dish, and the business’s numbers.
2. The Benefits Of Recipe Management Software
Recipe Management Software provide numerous benefits to restaurant operators:
- Cloud-based centralization: Making sure that your recipes can be found by the relevant users at all times is the first step in ensuring profitability. By opting for a digital solution that combines an all-time access to solid user permissions, you ensure that any relevant staff member can replicate any of your best sellers in full confidence.
- Cost control & profitability management: Digitizing your recipes means you can assign the fluctuations of your ingredients’ prices to the price of your menu item and measure the profitability of each menu item. This helps you better manage your menu.
- Improved communication and consistency in multi-branch businesses: Changing a recipe can be done at once and communicated across your business. By adding portions and step by step guidelines, your recipes can be tweaked and optimized at scale, efficiently.
- Accurate data-driven decision-making: Contrary to a pen-and-paper approach, digitizing your recipes with a recipe management software helps you keep track of the performance of each recipe and its profitability in real time.
3. The Features Of Recipe Management Software
Recipe Management Software should cover some basic features to provide satisfactory results.
1. Recipe Creation & Standardization: You should be able to create, store, and edit recipes easily. You should be able to list your ingredients, their portions in any unit of measurement (apply common sense here ! no need to list ketchup in KG!), and preparation method. Standardizing your recipes ensures consistency in presentation, taste, and portions.
2. Inventory Selection: Selecting the restaurant inventory in which the recipe will be present is key to have in your recipe management software to scale your restaurant operations. You should be able to select the price of the recipe per branch, and for semi-finished recipes (like sauces, for example), you should be able to set Par and Minimum Levels per inventory.
3. Cooking Guidelines: Your restaurant recipe management software should provide you with the ability of describing precisely how to prepare the dish through step-by-step explanations. It should also have the ability to add pictures of both the preparation steps and the finished product for presentation guidelines.
4. Cost Analysis: When creating a recipe, finding the right price is key to ensuring you make money while your customers also feel like they’re getting value for their money. By connecting your ingredients to your recipe’s expected pricing, you can visualize the profitability of your recipe and take appropriate action. Opt for a restaurant recipe management software that provides a built-in cost builder
6. Mobile Capabilities: Kitchens are compacted spaces occupied by many cooks. There isn’t always space for a laptop and a sit down area. This is why being able to access your recipes from a mobile device is key.
7. Allergens & Nutrition Information: Knowing what’s in your dish is crucial to protecting your customers from potential allergies. It is best practice to train your staff to know any allergens that could be present in a recipe to best advise customers.
Millions of Americans experience food allergies every year. About 30% of Americans avoid gluten in their diet. And 10% of Americans are vegan or vegetarian. This is why showing your allergen and nutrition information is important.
8. Real-Time Analysis: Monitoring the profitability of your recipes is key to maintaining a profitable business. Ingredient prices can fluctuate on a regular basis, so setting up alerts and notifications to stay informed whenever a dish starts selling at a loss, for example, is crucial. Opt for a restaurant recipe management system that helps you set target food cost, visualize the profitability of your recipes, and delivers an overview of how your menu is performing, in real-time.
You’ll find numerous solutions designed to help you manage your recipes. However, look out for specific features mentioned above for you to get the most value out of your tool.
Supy's Recipe Management Software For Restaurants
Create clear recipes, centralize them in the cloud, and monitor their profitability in real-time.
4. Challenges In Restaurant Recipe Management
You could choose the most advanced restaurant recipe management solution in the world, but if your team doesn’t follow it to the letter, then your recipes may not actually end up being consistent. It is therefore key to provide regular training to your staff in order to ensure compliance across your business and branches. The training should be done consistently over time, and should focus on the What and the Why of restaurant recipe management. The What should cover the basics of using a restaurant recipe management software, such as where to find recipes, and how to access and read the tool. The Why should include the entire reasoning behind why it matters, and the consequences of non compliance on the business. Keep in mind that many of your hires may come from other restaurants, and may bring with them the establishment’s standards, which may not be equal to yours.
2. Go digital
Keeping up with ingredient prices would also be a challenge if you were to choose not to go with a recipe management tool. Ingredient prices can change any day of the week, and keeping track of your suppliers’ prices is key to ensuring the profitability of your items. Keeping track of your ingredient prices on paper will prove itself to be a very, very time-consuming task.
3. Standardize cooking utensils
Yes, using the same cooking tools add yet another layer of control over the consistency of your recipes (McDonald’s are the masters of this practice). Take the example of ketchup, and imagine that the recipe indicates you should use a single tablespoon of it to prepare your sauce. But which tablespoon are we talking about ? Is it a standardized one, or is it the chef’s favorite actual tablespoon ? Not using the same utensil to prepare your dish will lead to inconsistencies, and in the long run, to potential losses.
To overcome this, you may label your utensils with code names or numbers. Standardizing the tablespoons you use and numbering them can be a n easy way to overcome this challenge.
4. Double Check Recipes Regularly
Training and standardization may not be enough. It is key to regularly check your dishes to ensure compliance and consistency. Double check all the information provided in your recipe management software to ensure its completeness and accuracy. Double check that your ingredient prices are being updated accurately by checking your latest invoice and the latest pricing in your system. Double check that the utensils you mentioned in your guidelines are still in existence and not lost and replaced by a utensil of a different size.
5. Conclusion
These platforms serve not just as a recipe database but as a comprehensive suite, incorporating aspects of cookbook software, recipe organizer apps, and online recipe organizers. They enhance operational efficiency, ensure compliance with food safety standards, and address challenges in recipe consistency and cost management.
Keep in mind that no matter what tool you end up choosing, staff will need to be regularly trained to ensure compliance with the tool, consistency in recipe prep, and the accuracy of the data going in and out of the system.
6. About Supy
Supy is a data-driven restaurant inventory management software built to help multi-chain restaurants cut costs. Our recipe management software, inventory management software, menu engineering software, and the rest of our suite of products are built to enable the free flow of data throughout your back of house operations. This enables decision-makers to make informed decisions any time, from anywhere.
Our recipe management software includes an intuitive interface that helps you build and replicate recipes easily, with ingredient listing, portioning, and pricing. Our built-in costing simulator helps chefs and owners construct profitable recipes, and both our real-time monitoring system and procurement software helps you monitor the profitability of your recipes at all times.
This makes Supy an ideal choice for those seeking an effective and efficient online recipe organizer.
