Using AI to Help

Puree AI can do the slow parts of recipe costing for you: drafting a recipe, reading one in from a photo or a web page, putting a price on ingredients you have not costed, and working out what a dish is suitable for. Every result lands in the editor for you to check before it counts.

How Credits Work

All of Puree’s AI features draw on one pool of AI credits for your account. Every account starts with 5 free credits, and top-ups are NZD $50 per 100 credits, so a credit is about 50 cents and a whole recipe import or cost estimate costs less than a coffee. Each AI button shows what it costs and how many credits you have left, and a feature that fails part-way refunds its credit. Each dialog also carries a Need more? link that emails us, and when the pool runs out the buttons are disabled until more credits are added.

To see your balance, what every AI feature costs and a log of who spent what, go to Settings → Account Details → AI Settings. The full picture of credits, pricing and how to buy more is on AI Photos & Settings.

Draft a Recipe From a Description

Open a new recipe, click Import recipe and stay on the Puree AI tab. Describe what you want to make and Puree drafts the whole thing: ingredients, quantities, yield and method, ready to edit. Constraints help: “Gluten-free chocolate brownies, 24 portions, in a 30×40 cm slab” gives a better draft than “brownies”. It understands catering quantities, so “for 50 portions” or “in a half hotel pan” both work. Name the dish in the first line and put your notes after it.

If you started from an existing menu item, the description is pre-filled with the item’s name.

Read a Recipe In

The other tabs of the same dialog import a recipe you already have from pasted text, a web address, a photo or a document. That flow has its own page: Importing Your Recipes.

Estimate Ingredient Costs

An ingredient with no cost leaves a hole in the food cost. On the Recipes page, a recipe with uncosted ingredients shows Use AI to estimate N missing ingredient costs. Click it and Puree fills each gap with a sensible trade price for your currency, marked ≈ with a confidence (low, medium or high) so you know it is an estimate.

Costs you enter or confirm yourself are never overwritten. Once every line is priced, the button changes to Update AI estimates, which re-runs only the ≈ figures and leaves yours alone.

When an estimate looks right, say so: click the ≈ beside the line on the Recipes page to confirm that one ingredient, or Confirm all estimates beneath the Update button to accept every estimate on the recipe. Inside an ingredient’s own panel the same action is Confirm cost as correct, under the cost form. Confirming changes nothing but the label and uses no credits.

The same button also fills in missing conversion data. If an ingredient is priced per kg but the recipe measures it in cups, Puree needs a density or a typical weight to cost the line. The amber note on such a line offers to estimate it.

Research a Price

For a single ingredient you want priced properly, go to Logistics → Ingredients and click the green magnifier beside its cost. The ingredient’s panel opens; under Research prices, click Research price and Puree AI looks up current trade pricing for your region and currency and shows what it found, with sources. Click Use this to apply a price, or enter your own if nothing verifiable came back. Past searches stay listed below, so you can see how a price has moved.

The same panel has a Detect with AI button under Allergens that tags this one ingredient’s allergens, for half a credit.

Detect Dietary Codes and Allergens

Once a recipe has ingredients, the Dietary & Allergens panel at the top of the recipe editor (and on the menu item’s edit page) offers two checks:

• Detect dietary with AI judges the whole dish’s suitability, gluten-free, vegan, dairy-free and so on, and applies the matching codes to the item. Certification-based codes such as halal and kosher are not detected: add those yourself.
• Detect allergens with AI tags each ingredient’s allergens and rolls them up onto the item, so a dish inherits the allergens of what goes into it.

The results appear as codes in the panel. Click the cross on a code to remove it, or pick one from the dropdown and click Add to apply a code the AI cannot know about, such as keto or halal. Whatever the panel shows is what reaches your quotes and menus. See Dietary Codes, Allergens & Menu Disclaimer and the article Allergens: Flag What Each Menu Item Contains, Separate from Dietary Codes.

Better AI Photos

If you generate AI images for your menu, a linked recipe improves them: the ingredients and method are fed into the prompt, so the photo reflects what is actually in the dish. A recipe imported for a brand-new menu item gets its photo generated on save. See AI Photos & Settings.

Scan a Supplier Price List

Ingredient prices move. The Scan document button on the Ingredients page (and in the kitchen navigation) takes a supplier’s invoice, receipt or price list as a PDF, JPG or PNG up to about 8 MB. On a phone you can snap a photo straight from the picker. Puree reads the lines, matches them to your ingredients and updates their costs in one pass, and you can pin the supplier first if you already know who it is from. Past scans lists the documents you have already run. See Supplier Price Lists.

Puree AI proposes; you decide. Every figure it produces is visible as an estimate until you confirm it, and nothing it drafts is saved until you click Save.