Recipes, Ingredients & Food Cost: Know Exactly What Every Dish Costs You

Most caterers price their menus on instinct and a spreadsheet that's three updates out of date. You know roughly what a dish costs — until your supplier quietly puts cream up 18%, or you scale a canapé recipe from 50 to 300 and the maths drifts. Recipes, Ingredients & Food Cost brings that whole picture into Puree: an ingredient library with real costs, scalable recipes attached to your menu items, and an automatic food-cost and margin figure on every dish you sell.

Three Pieces That Fit Together

The feature is built from three connected parts. You can use as much or as little as you like — an ingredient library on its own is useful; add recipes and you get costing; add supplier price lists and the whole thing stays current with almost no typing.

• Ingredients — your pantry library. Each ingredient has a cost per unit (per kg, per litre, per each) so it can be costed wherever it's used.
• Recipes — a list of ingredients with quantities, attached to a menu item. Puree adds up the cost, scales it to any batch size, and works out your margin against the item's selling price.
• Supplier price lists — upload a supplier's PDF or a photo of a price sheet and Puree reads the lines, matches them to your ingredients, and updates the costs.

The Ingredient Library

Open Logistics → Ingredients to build your library. An ingredient is anything you buy to cook with — double cream, 00 flour, free-range eggs, Maldon salt. Each one carries a cost per unit and the unit it's measured in, so a recipe that calls for 200 ml of cream knows exactly what those 200 ml cost.

Ingredients are grouped into categories (dairy, dry goods, produce, meat & fish…) so a long pantry stays navigable, and you can record the supplier and brand you usually buy. If you'd rather not cost every line by hand, Puree can estimate a starting cost for an ingredient and flag how confident it is, giving you a sensible number to refine later rather than a blank field.

Because real pantries accumulate duplicates — "cream", "Cream", "double cream" — there's a duplicate finder that spots likely matches and lets you merge them into one, keeping costs consistent everywhere they're referenced.

Recipes Attached to Your Menu Items

A recipe in Puree belongs to a menu item — it's the costed build behind the dish your customer sees. On any menu item you'll find a Recipe panel: link a recipe (or start a new one) and add the ingredients with their quantities. As you build it, the food cost updates live.

Each recipe has a base yield — "this makes 50 canapés" or "this serves 10" — and Puree can scale it to whatever batch you actually need for an event. Quantities, and the total cost, recalculate proportionally, so a recipe written once works for a dinner for 8 and a wedding for 280. You can record a method and per-ingredient notes (waste allowance, prep notes) alongside the quantities, turning the recipe into a genuine kitchen card, not just a costing sheet.

Food Cost & Margin, Calculated For You

This is the payoff. Once an item has a recipe, Puree shows its food cost — the total ingredient cost — and, against the item's selling price, your margin. On the menu items list, menu-category items gain a Food cost column so you can scan your whole range and immediately see which dishes are carrying you and which are quietly losing money.

Margins are colour-coded so problems jump out — a healthy margin reads green, a thin one amber, a loss-maker red. When a supplier price moves, every dish that uses that ingredient re-costs automatically, so the day cream goes up you can see exactly which canapés just got less profitable.

Supplier Price Lists, Scanned

Keeping ingredient costs current is the part everyone avoids. So Puree does the typing for you. Under Logistics → Scan document, upload a supplier's price list — a PDF, or even a photo of a printed sheet — and Puree reads each line, pulls out the product, pack size and price, and matches it to ingredients in your library.

You review the extracted lines before anything changes: confirm the matches, adjust pack sizes where needed, and apply. Small changes where the unit already matches can apply automatically; anything ambiguous waits for your nod. The result is an ingredient library that reflects what you're actually paying this month, not last quarter — and food costs that stay honest as a result.

AI Photos That Know the Recipe

There's a quiet bonus for caterers who generate AI images for their menu. When an item has a linked recipe, its ingredients and method feed into the image prompt — so a generated photo of your "Sticky toffee pudding" is informed by what's actually in it, not just the name. Better in, better out.

Why It Matters

Catering margins are thin and ingredient prices never sit still. Pricing a menu without knowing its food cost is guessing; reviewing it once a year is guessing more slowly. With recipes attached to your items and supplier prices kept current, Puree turns "I think this is profitable" into a number you can see — per dish, across your whole menu, updated the moment a cost changes.

Start with a handful of your highest-volume dishes, build their recipes, and watch the food-cost column fill in. It's the fastest way to find out where your margin is really going.