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Recipes
Recipes are the heart of DigiChef. By building your menu as recipes — with real ingredients at real costs — DigiChef can calculate exactly what it costs to produce every dish and how that tracks against your menu price.
DigiChef has two types of recipes: plating recipes and prep recipes. Understanding the difference is the key to getting the most out of the platform.
Plating recipes vs. prep recipes
| Plating recipe | Prep recipe | |
|---|---|---|
| What it represents | A menu item sold to customers | A batch-prepped ingredient used by other recipes |
| Has a menu price | Yes | No |
| Sold per serving | Yes | No — made in batches |
| Shows food cost % | Yes | Shows cost per unit of yield |
| Can be an ingredient in | Menus | Plating recipes and other prep recipes |
Think of it this way: if your customers order it, it's a plating recipe. If your kitchen makes it in bulk to use across multiple dishes, it's a prep recipe.
Example:
- Beef Taco — plating recipe
- Beef Taco Mix — prep recipe (used inside the Beef Taco plating recipe)
- House Salsa — prep recipe (used in multiple different plating recipes)
Food cost percentage
For every plating recipe, DigiChef automatically calculates:
$$\text{Food Cost %} = \frac{\text{Total Ingredient Cost}}{\text{Menu Price}} \times 100$$
This updates in real time whenever ingredient prices change due to new invoices — so you always know whether your margins are intact.
Industry benchmark: Most restaurants target a food cost of 28–35% depending on their concept and price point. Quick-service and high-volume operations often target the lower end; fine dining typically accepts slightly higher food cost offset by higher ticket prices.
Managing your recipe library
Plating Recipes Overview
Navigate to Plating Recipes to see all your menu items with their current food cost percentage at a glance.
Prep Recipes Overview
Navigate to Prep Recipes to manage your batch-prep ingredients.
Both views support filtering by name to quickly find what you're looking for.
Recipe detail page
Clicking into any recipe shows you:
- Current food cost — total ingredient cost, menu price, and food cost %
- Suggested menu price — the price DigiChef recommends to hit your target food cost percentage, based on the current cost to produce the dish
- Ingredient breakdown — each ingredient with its current cost and contribution to total cost
- Cost history — a chart of how the food cost % has changed over time
- Methods — preparation steps (if entered)
- Assigned menus & tags
TIP
The ingredient breakdown on a recipe detail page is one of the most powerful views in DigiChef. It shows you exactly which ingredients are driving your cost, making it easy to focus your cost-reduction efforts where they'll have the biggest impact.
TIP
Use the Suggested Menu Price as a prompt to review your pricing whenever ingredient costs shift. It's calculated based on your configured target food cost percentage — so if you're targeting 30% food cost and your production cost increases, DigiChef will show you the new price needed to maintain that target.
PDF guides
DigiChef can generate printable PDF guides for your recipes — useful for posting in the kitchen, training new staff, or maintaining a physical recipe binder.
Plating guide
A plating guide shows the finished dish presentation — intended as a visual reference for your team. Download from the recipe detail page via Options > Download Plating Guide.
Recipe guide
A recipe guide includes the full recipe: ingredients, quantities, and preparation methods. Download from the recipe detail page via Options > Download PDF.
You can also bulk-download guides for all recipes at once from the Plating Recipes Overview via Export > All Plating Guides or All Recipe Guides.
Editing a recipe
To update a recipe's ingredients, menu price, or other details:
- Open the recipe.
- Click Edit.
- Use the step tabs to navigate to the section you want to update (Basic Info, Ingredients, Methods, Images, Menus).
- Make your changes and click Finish (or Next to proceed through the steps).
INFO
When you update a recipe's ingredients, DigiChef immediately recalculates the food cost. You don't need to save or trigger a recalculation manually.
Prep recipes as ingredients
One of the most powerful features of DigiChef's recipe system is the ability to use prep recipes as ingredients inside plating recipes. This is called recipe nesting.
Why this matters:
- If you change the brand of tomatoes in your Tomato Salsa prep recipe, every plating recipe that uses that salsa is updated automatically.
- Your plating recipe cost always reflects the true cost of everything that goes into it, even across multiple layers of prep.
TIP
Build your prep recipes first, then build your plating recipes using them as ingredients. The more granular your prep recipes, the more accurate — and flexible — your food cost tracking will be.