Meal Recipes and Nutrition

Meal Recipes and Nutrition

This article covers how to set up recipes for meals, view auto-calculated nutrition facts, and print recipes for your kitchen staff.

Why Add Recipes?

Adding recipes to your meals provides several benefits:
  • Digital and printable recipes for kitchen staff to reference during meal preparation
  • Standardised preparation across your team
  • Portion control with serving size information
  • Automatic nutrition facts calculated from ingredients (note: this is an estimate only)

While recipes are optional, they help maintain consistency and provide valuable information for your kitchen staff.

Setting Up a Recipe

1. Open a Meal

Open the meal you want to add a recipe to (create a new meal or edit an existing one). Click the Recipe tab.


2. Set Servings Count

Enter the number of servings this recipe yields. This is required for ingredient scaling and nutrition calculations. For example, if your recipe makes 8 portions, enter 8.


3. Add Ingredients

Search the Ingredient Database
  1. Click Add Ingredient
  2. Start typing the ingredient name (e.g., "chicken breast")
  3. Select from the auto-complete suggestions
  4. Enter the Quantity (e.g., 500)
  5. Select the Unit from the dropdown (grams, kilograms, milliliters, liters, etc.)


The ingredient database includes nutritional information from the Australian Food Composition Database (AFCD), enabling automatic nutrition calculations.

Create Custom Ingredients

If an ingredient isn't in the database:
  1. Type the ingredient name (e.g., "bok choy")
  2. If no match appears, or none of the matches is what you're looking for, click "Create ingredient..." - this is always the last option in the autocomplete dropdown
  3. Enter the Quantity
  4. Enter a custom unit description (e.g., "bunch", "tablespoon")

Notes
Important: Custom ingredients will not contribute to the automatic nutrition calculation. You'll see a warning if your recipe contains custom ingredients.
Notes
Important: Adding ingredients does NOT automatically update allergens on the Details tab. Ingredient databases cannot account for allergen traces or processing in your specific products. Always check your actual ingredients and manually update the allergen list on the Details tab.

Reorder Ingredients

You can drag and drop ingredients to reorder them. This is helpful for grouping related ingredients or listing them in the order they're used.



4. Add Recipe Instructions
  1. Click Add Step to create a new instruction step
  2. Enter the instruction text (free-form text)
  3. Steps are automatically numbered (1, 2, 3...)
  4. Add as many steps as needed

Reorder Steps

Like ingredients, you can drag and drop steps to reorder them.


5. Save

Click Save to store your recipe. You can now view nutrition facts and print the recipe.

Viewing Nutrition Facts

How It Works

The Nutrition Facts tab shows auto-calculated nutrition information based on:
  • Ingredient quantities and units
  • Nutrient data from the Australian Food Composition Database (AFCD)
  • Your servings count

The calculation is per serving (total nutrients รท servings count).

Accessing Nutrition Facts
  1. Open a meal with a recipe
  2. Click the Nutrition Facts tab
  3. View the nutrition table

What You'll See

The nutrition table displays:
  1. Energy: Total calories in kJ and Cal
  2. Macronutrients: Protein, Fat, Carbohydrate, and Sodium
  3. Micronutrients: Various vitamins and minerals

Incomplete Nutrition Information

You may see warnings in the following cases:

Invalid Recipe

Note
Add ingredients and servings count to the recipe to calculate Nutrition Facts

This means:
  • You haven't added any ingredients yet, OR
  • You haven't set a servings count

Add these to enable nutrition calculations.

Custom Ingredients

Note
The recipe for this meal has custom ingredients. Nutrition facts will be incomplete.

This means:
  • One or more ingredients are custom (not from the database)
  • Nutrition facts will only include nutrients from database ingredients
  • The calculation will be partial and may underestimate total nutrition

For complete nutrition data, try to use database ingredients whenever possible.

Printing a Recipe

Printed recipes are useful for kitchen staff during meal preparation.

How to Print

Method 1: From the Menu Plan
  1. Go to a weekly menu on the Plan page
  2. Click the three-dot menu next to an item
  3. If a recipe is available, a View Recipe option will be available. Select it
  4. In the recipe panel that opens, scroll to the bottom and select the Printer friendly version link
  5. The recipe opens in a print-friendly page
  6. Use your browser's print function (Ctrl+P / Cmd+P)


Method 2: From the All Items List
  1. From the Plan page go to the All Items list
  2. Select the recipe button which appears in the right-most column
  3. In the recipe panel that opens, scroll to the bottom and select the Printer friendly version link
  4. Print using your browser



What's Included in the Print

The printed recipe displays:
  • Meal photo (if available)
  • Meal name
  • Print date (for version tracking)
  • Ingredients table with quantities and units
  • Allergen information
  • Recipe steps (if available)

The print layout is optimised for readability with clear formatting and sufficient spacing.