Importing Your Recipes

Most caterers already have their recipes, in a binder, a spreadsheet, a favourite website or a folder of phone photos. Import them instead of retyping.

Where to Find Import

Open a new recipe (from a menu item’s Recipe panel or from Logistics → Recipes → New recipe) and click Import recipe at the top of the editor. A dialog opens with five tabs. The first, Puree AI, drafts a recipe from a description and is covered in Using AI to Help. The other four import a recipe you already have.

Paste Text

Copy the recipe from anywhere, a website, an email, a Notion page, the text of a scanned book, and paste it in. Puree works out the title, the ingredients with their quantities and units, the yield, the times and the method. Formatting does not matter much: a plain list of ingredients followed by the steps is enough.

From URL

Paste the address of a recipe page and Puree fetches it and reads the recipe out of the page. This works on most public recipe sites. Paywalled pages and sites that only build the recipe in the browser cannot be fetched; copy the text and use Paste text instead.

From Photo

Upload a photo or screenshot: a cookbook page, a magazine clipping, a handwritten recipe card or an Instagram screenshot. PNG, JPG and HEIC all work. Puree reads the image and extracts the recipe, handwriting included, though a clear, well-lit photo gives a better result.

From Document

Upload a PDF, a Word document or a text export from another system. This suits recipe binders that were already digital, supplier spec sheets and exports from other kitchen software. Files can be up to 20 MB. Import one recipe at a time: for a binder that holds several, split the file into one document per recipe, or copy each recipe out and use Paste text.

What Happens Next

Puree fills the editor in rather than saving anything. You will see:

• The recipe name and a suggested menu category, unless you started from an existing menu item, in which case those stay as they are.
• Yield, prep and cook times where the source gave them.
• The method, laid out as steps.
• Every ingredient as a line with quantity and unit. Where a name matches something in your Ingredients Library the existing ingredient is used, so its cost flows straight into the food cost. Anything new is created as a fresh ingredient with no cost yet.

Read it through and tidy it to how you actually make the dish: quantities in the units your kitchen uses, the yield you really get, any ingredient the source left out. Nothing reaches your account until you click Save.

If the import created a new menu item, Puree generates an AI photo for it when you save (see AI Photos & Settings). Upload your own photo before saving if you would rather use that.

Costing the New Ingredients

Imported ingredients that were not already in your library arrive without a cost, so the dish’s food cost will read low until they are priced. On the Recipes page the recipe shows how many ingredient costs are missing, with a button to have Puree estimate them. Details in Using AI to Help, or set the costs yourself from Logistics → Ingredients.

AI Credits

Each import uses 1 AI credit, whatever the source. Credits are shared across every AI feature in Puree and top up at NZD $50 per 100, so an import costs about 50 cents. The dialog shows how many credits you have left before you start, and if a fetch fails the credit is refunded. How credits work, and how to buy more, is explained on AI Photos & Settings.