Keeping your ingredient data up to date is essential and Apicbase is the perfect tool for this. This article gives tips on how to fill the ingredient data.
If you want to learn how to create an ingredient manually, click here.
In this article, we explain most of the fields you can fill out for an ingredient and give recommendations in order to get the most out of Apicbase.
General
- Product Name: Obviously a required field representing the full name by which you can recognize this article. Often this name includes the brand or some short packaging info.
- Simplified Product Name: Often the Full Ingredient Name is not what you wish to use on more customer-centric documents (e.g. when printing out a recipe or generating a label). The simplified Ingredient Name allows you to give a second shorter name for the ingredient that will be visible when checking recipes. You have to set that the simplified names will be visible in your library settings.
The following fields are not used by the software for any specific purpose but can be used in the search, filtering and output: Brand, Category, Subcategory, Accounting Category, Storage Instructions, Document URL, Shelf Life, Description/Specifications.
- Ingredient verification: We strongly advise to use the Approved/Allowed feature so that you can distinguish between ingredients that are no longer or not yet in use for production and those ingredients that are currently approved for production use. You can decide if you need both "Approved" and "Allowed". You can also just use one, depending on your verification process.
- We also advise using the "Category", "Subcategory", and "Accounting category". Click here to learn more about these categories.
- The "Status" will show you important info on the creation and modification of the ingredient.
- "Used in" shows the recipe in which the ingredient is used.
Package and Pricing
The package and pricing information is crucial for calculating food cost, nutritional value, generating bills of materials, ordering, and stock management. It is important to take the time to fill in this information correctly.
You can also fill in this information using Excel packaging and pricing template. Please see this article for filling out all the required information for calculating food costs.
Overall we recommend filling out pricing and at least also supply mass or volume information. For the most transparent and professional use, we even advise to roll out a company-wide policy to only express package info in terms of mass and even limiting to only e.g. grams. Our software can convert between many types of measurements but from a user perspective and transparency of the software, it is often better to opt for a single packaging measurement.
- Unique Article Number: We advise using this field for e.g. the EAN or UPC number that uniquely identifies the article. With this information, we can often get more background information about the product.
- Supplier: We strongly advise to fill out a Supplier as it allows our procurement module to generate a more detailed Bill of Materials and ordering sheets.
Allergens
Please see this article for filling out allergens' information.
Dietary info
Dietary info can be added the same way as allergens. Additives and meat types are automatically copied to the recipes you use the ingredient in. The diet has to be filled in manually in the recipe.
Nutritions
Nutritional info can be added via one of the linked databases and validated. Read more on using the databases in this article.
Custom fields
If you want to learn more about adding custom fields, please read the following article.
Images
You can find more information on adding images to recipes by reading this article.
Outlets
Read up on assigning ingredients to outlets in this article.