Sub-recipes

Our NPDtech product for food manufacturers has a new ability – rolling up all the ingredients in a sub-recipe to form an accumulated ingredients declaration.

Note: while this example deals with recipes, the agileBase platform can use the same features to work with any items that require a rollup e.g a bill of materials (BOM).

Take a simple example – a recipe for beef pie. The ingredients might be entered as follows:

making the ingredients declaration

Rump Steak (46.4%), Stock (29.4%), ShortCrust Pastry (11.6%), Onion (10.3%), Olive Oil (0.77%), Salt (0.52%), Black Pepper (0.41%), Thyme, Parsley

However, shortcrust pastry is itself a recipe with ingredients

Flour (57.3%), Butter (25.2%), Water (16.1%), Salt (1.38%)

We now have the option to roll up the ingredients from this sub-recipe into the top level ingredients declaration, creating

Rump Steak (46.4%), Stock (29.4%), Onion (10.3%), Flour (6.7%), Butter (2.9%), Water (1.86%), Olive Oil (0.77%), Salt (0.68%), Black Pepper (0.41%), Thyme, Parsley

As you can see the additional ingredients salt, butter, water and flour are now included with the correct percentages of the total recipe.

The great thing about this is that it will work with not just one level of sub-recipe but the sub-recipes themselves can have sub-recipes and so on to any depth.

When generating this ingredients declaration, the system gives you the option of starting with either the top level or full ‘rolled up’ version. Following that, it can be manually tweaked as required. Another nice addition is that you can now specify a percentage level below which no percentages will be output – in the above example, it’s set at 0.3%, meaning the herbs percentages aren’t shown.

What’s more, when editing a recipe, a tab alongside ‘ingredients’ shows you which product each sub-ingredient comes from, along with the countries of origin.

A major benefit is the fact that you can search the system for any ingredient and immediately see which recipes contain it, even if the connection isn’t direct. That could be very useful if any ingredient alerts (those from the FSA are displayed in the system) or recalls are required.

For anyone interested in the technicalities of how this rollup works behind the scenes, it utilises agileBase’s ‘recursive workflow‘ feature, which we wrote about back in July.