Recipes & ingredients

A recipe is the source document for four different outputs - the nutrition panel, the ingredient statement, the allergen declaration, and the cost per unit. Maintaining those separately is how they drift apart.

Why the ingredient statement is the part people get wrong

The panel is arithmetic, and arithmetic is easy to check. The ingredient statement is where self-built labels usually fail, because it encodes rules that are not obvious.

Ingredients appear in descending order of predominance by weight - as incorporated, not as purchased. Compound ingredients carry their own sub-ingredients in parentheses under 21 CFR § 101.4, in their own descending order. Change one quantity and the whole order can shift.

Derived from the recipe, this is automatic. Maintained by hand, it silently goes stale the first time somebody adjusts a formula without re-sorting the list.

Yield, waste and the moisture problem

The nutrients in a finished product are not the nutrients in the ingredients you weighed out, and the gap is mostly water.

A sauce reduced by a third concentrates everything left behind - per-100 g sodium, sugars and calories all rise, while the totals stay put. Bread loses moisture in the oven. Trim and peel losses remove mass before cooking even starts.

Entering yield and waste factors is what separates a panel that reflects the product from one that reflects the shopping list. It is also the most common reason two people compute different numbers from the same recipe.

Sub-recipes compound

Your house vinaigrette, spice blend or base sauce appears in a dozen products. Saved once and referenced everywhere, a change to it recalculates every downstream recipe at the same time.

Maintained as twelve copies, a supplier change means twelve edits, and the failure mode is not doing eleven - it is doing eleven and believing you did twelve.

Costing from the same record

Because the recipe already holds quantities, adding ingredient prices produces cost per batch, per serving and per unit at no extra effort. Set a target margin and the retail and wholesale prices fall out of it.

The value is in the propagation: when an input price moves, every product using it reprices at once, and you can see which lines stopped being profitable rather than finding out at quarter end.

Allergens, derived rather than remembered

The nine major allergens - milk, eggs, fish, crustacean shellfish, tree nuts, peanuts, wheat, soybeans, and sesame, added by the FASTER Act - are declared from the ingredients themselves, with the allergen emphasised in the statement and the "Contains:" line generated to match.

Undeclared allergens are among the leading causes of food recalls in the United States, and the usual cause is mundane: a formulation changed and the declaration did not follow. Deriving it removes that gap.

Common questions

Where does the nutrition data come from? USDA FoodData Central, with custom ingredients supported for anything not in it - including supplier specification values.

Can I use my supplier's spec sheet numbers? Yes. Enter them as a custom ingredient; that is often more accurate than a generic database entry.

Does it handle metric and US units? Yes, mixed within a recipe, with conversion handled for you.

Can I export the recipe itself? Yes - JSON export carries the full ingredient list, quantities and nutrient data, so the recipe is portable rather than locked in.

Do I need an account? For saving recipes, yes, since they sync to your library. The label generator's three US FDA formats are free to use without one.