As part of our Enterprise Recipe Management Suite, BirchStreet today announces a powerful new feature for managing food costs.  The feature, called Recipe Cost Alerts, is an intelligent alert system that notifies you when recipe costs exceed your specified threshold, providing greater food cost visibility and control.

Recipes Tied To Constantly Updated Supplier Catalogs

When the Recipe Management Suite is used with BirchStreet’s e-Procurement Application, ingredients in your recipes can be linked to food products in our online catalogs.  As part of our e-Procurement solution, thousands of food suppliers are constantly logging into our system and updating product prices.  Larger suppliers send us price updates through hard-wired interfaces from their back-office system.  Many food products are updated weekly.  Some are updated daily.  The Recipe Cost Alert system uses this constant flow of updated prices to automatically recalculate your recipe cost on a weekly basis, allowing you to view and track recipe and ingredient cost changes over time.

To fully leverage this, the system allows you to set a “baseline” cost for each of your recipes. Once you’ve established a baseline, you can set a notification threshold: for example 5%.  The system will send you a report listing every recipe that exceeds your baseline by the chosen tolerance (in this example, 5%) allowing you to zero in on problematic recipes and keep your food cost on target.  Since cost is calculated at the ingredient level you can find exactly what ingredients are pushing your recipes over the threshold and make the needed changes to bring the recipe’s cost inline.  The result is unprecedented visibility and control over your food cost allowing you to quickly react to changing market conditions and keep your F&B operations on target.

Recipe Cost Alert Report

To learn more about BirchStreet’s Enterprise Recipe Management Suite, visit our website at http://www.birchstreet.net/index.php/recipe-management.