With Lightspeed Produce, you can use the recipe cost calculator to calculate the cost of batch or made-to-order recipes. It provides a breakdown per batch, unit, and ingredient, helping you adjust quantities, ingredients, and pricing to see how they impact your gross profit.
This article guides you through understanding recipe types and using the cost calculator to manage your recipes.
What’s in this guide?
What you'll need
Understanding recipe types
Managing recipes using the cost calculator
What you'll need
- Produce enabled with a supported Produce plan.
- Your products added in Back Office.
- Your recipes created in Produce.
Understanding recipe types
The recipe cost calculator can be used with all recipe types. It allows you to optimize costs when reviewing individual products or batch-prepared items. The following are the recipe types that can be used with the cost calculator:
- Made-to-order products: These are the items that are prepared after a customer places an order, such as pizza, lasagna, cocktails.
- Batch-prepared items that are not sold directly: These are items that are prepared in-house and commonly used as ingredients in other recipes. Examples include pizza dough and marinara sauce.
- Batch-prepared items that are sold individually: These are items that are made in bulk and then served as individual portions. Examples include croissants, iced tea, and spaghetti.
Creating or updating a recipe
When creating or updating a recipe, the fields shown in the cost calculator may vary depending on whether it is a batch recipe or a made-to-order recipe, as well as other values configured within the recipe. You can adjust values such as ingredient quantities and expected yield to see how they affect your total cost and profit.
When calculating ingredient costs, Lightspeed first uses the recipe cost from Produce. If no recipe exists, it uses the average cost price from purchase data, and if neither is available, it uses the fixed cost price set in Back Office. For more information, refer to our article on calculating your cost of goods with Lightspeed Restaurant.
To create or update a recipe:
- Log in to Lightspeed Produce using your Back Office credentials.
- From the navigation menu, select Recipes, then select the recipe you want to update. If you're creating a new recipe, click Create a recipe.
- Select the item for which you want to update or create a recipe. Here, you can view and modify the following fields:
- Cost: The cost per ingredient based on quantity used and current stock cost from Back Office, Purchase or Produce data. Any unit conversions for the stock items used in recipes are calculated automatically. Cost prices can be edited in Back Office by users with the appropriate permissions.
- Unit Cost: The total cost divided by the expected yield. This is only seen in batch recipes.
- Total Cost: This is the sum of all ingredient costs.
- Gross Profit: The profit percentage based on sell price and unit cost. Even in batch recipes, this field shows the gross profit (GP)% for the individual product or unit. You can adjust this value to preview a suggested sell price, but changes are for estimation only and cannot be saved.
- Suggested Sell Price: The product selling price taken from the company price set in Back Office. You can adjust this value to see how gross profit changes, but this is for estimation only and cannot be saved. Sell price and gross profit are only shown for items you marked as sellable in Back Office.
- Expected yield: Indicates how much the batch recipe makes. This value is also used to calculate the unit cost of the finished recipe.
- Quantity: Enter the amount of the ingredient to use in the recipe. Adjusting this value updates the cost of the specific ingredient for the recipe and recalculates the total cost.
- Once you're finished, click Save recipe.
What's next?
Create recipes to track ingredient usage, manage costs, and keep your inventory up to date.
Manage your purchase orders and deliveries to maintain accurate inventory and costing.