Ingredients

Any product you buy directly from a supplier is an ingredient. So an ingredient is a ready-to-use item. These ingredients appear in Horeko by automatically importing them or by adding them yourself.

Want to know more about how to get ingredients in your database, have a look at the article Supplier Interface and Importing

Adding ingredients manually

To add an ingredient manually, navigate to Recipes > Ingredients and click on + New at the top of the page. You will see an empty page where you can add information for the ingredient. Here are the information fields explained:

Ingredient Name: Use the supplier's ingredient name here.

Ingredient Description: Add information about the ingredient if needed.
Supplier Article Number: Make sure you add the supplier's article number here. This number is used to match and update ingredients during imports.
Brand: Fill in the brand for easier search.
Storage Location: Add the storage location if you want to inform how and where to store the product.
Status: This can't be changed manually but is updated by suppliers to show if an ingredient is still available or needs to be replaced.
Supplier: Connect the ingredient to the correct supplier. Can't find the supplier? Add it to your supplier overview at Manage (Kitchen) > Suppliers.
Category: You can separate your ingredients into categories if needed. For example, Fish, Dairy, Fruit, etc. You can set up your categories in Manage (Kitchen) > Categories.
GTIN Code: This is the trade code of the product, which in Horeko can be connected to PS foodbooks to get nutrition and allergy information automatically loaded into your database.

Not all information is required to be filled in; however, the more information you add, the better your ingredient information can be used throughout your database.

Pricing information

You can add the product purchase price (Excluding tax), the products per package and the usable amount of the product. Here you also choose the unit of the product.
Also it is an option the excluded the ingredient from the gross profit calculation in a dish (mostly used for packaging)

Units
In Horeko, ingredients can be indicated in the following units:

Gram
Milliliter
Pieces

An ingredient is listed in the unit as supplied by the supplier. For example, a box with 30 cucumbers:

Or a one jar with 1 kilo of green pesto:

When an ingredient is added, use the usable amount provided by the supplier, whether added manually or automatically imported.

We advise our customers not to change the units of ingredients. If you change the unit of an ingredient and later want to multiply a dish or menu and make an order recommendation based on that, you will need to manually recalculate what you actually have to order from your supplier. Therefore, when entering ingredients in dishes, stick to the unit stated for the ingredient. Of course, you can use different variants within one unit, such as entering 2 kilos for a gram-based product.

🤔 ‘’But surely it's much more convenient to speak of, say, 4 slices of cucumber in a dish?‘’

Yes, it is! To make that happen, you can create subrecipes. This makes your dishes more readable and allows you to standardize the usable amount you get from one cucumber, for example. You can read more about this in the article on subrecipes.

Note that if you still change the unit of an ingredient used in a dish (both active and inactive) and click save, Horeko will display the following message:

The first time you import ingredients by filling in and importing our template (Excel file), these ingredients are added in Horeko in a certain unit. This unit always remains fixed. You can always add ingredients, adjust prices, and change allergen information in the existing Excel file. If you import the file again, new ingredients are added, and price and allergen information of already existing ingredients are adjusted.

If you change the unit of an ingredient already existing in Horeko in the Excel file, the unit in Horeko will not be changed. In that case, you will have to change the unit manually in Horeko.

Read more where and how ingredients are used in: