Guides · For home food businesses in India
How to track ingredients and recipe quantities in a home food business
The short answer
Write each recipe down once as ingredients and quantities per batch. Then every order can be turned into a list of what to pull, your stock can go down by that amount when the order is made, and a low-stock list tells you what to buy. Add what you spend on ingredients and packaging and you can see what an order really cost. AdugeOps does these four things together on its Master Chef plan: recipes, stock, a shopping list and expenses.
Start with the recipe, per batch
Most home kitchens cook from memory. That works for the cook and fails the moment an order is for 40 boxes instead of 4, or someone else has to make it.
Write the recipe as one batch: what goes in, how much, and how many packs it makes. For example, one batch of ragi laddu might use ragi flour, jaggery and ghee and make 20 packs of 250 g. Once that is written down, any order size is multiplication.
Four numbers worth knowing
- 1
What this order needs
Recipe quantity times the number of batches. This is what you pull from the shelf.
- 2
What is on the shelf
Stock of each ingredient: what you bought, minus what you used, minus what you threw away.
- 3
What to buy
What upcoming orders need, compared with what is on the shelf.
- 4
What it cost
Ingredients plus packaging plus delivery for an order, against what you charged.
Keep stock as a running record, not a single number
The common mistake is one cell per ingredient that gets overwritten. When it looks wrong, nobody can say why.
Keep three kinds of entry instead: stock in (a purchase), stock out (used for an order) and wastage. Today’s stock is the sum of them. A mistake is fixed by adding a correcting entry, so the history always explains the number.
How AdugeOps does it
Recipes
Ingredients and quantities per batch, attached to each product. The kitchen board shows recipe quantities next to what needs making.
Stock that updates itself
When an order is marked Ready, its ingredients come off your stock. Every change is a new entry; nothing is overwritten. You choose whether orders are linked to stock.
Low-stock warnings and a shopping list
You are told when an ingredient is running low, and the shopping list is built from upcoming orders and what is short.
Expenses
Ingredients, packaging, delivery and wastage, with an expense linked to the order it was for.
These are part of the Master Chef plan. Each one can be switched on when you are ready for it, so you can start with orders alone.
When a spreadsheet is still the right answer
If you make three products and take a few orders a week, a spreadsheet with one tab for recipes and one for purchases is enough. The work becomes worth handing over when you have more products than you can hold in your head, or when you have run out of an ingredient in the middle of an order more than once.
Common questions
How do I work out how much of each ingredient a large order needs?
Write the recipe per batch with the number of packs a batch makes. Divide the order by packs per batch to get the number of batches, then multiply each ingredient by that. AdugeOps does this from the recipe you enter.
Does stock go down automatically when I make an order?
In AdugeOps, yes, if you switch that link on: ingredients are deducted from stock when an order is marked Ready, based on the recipe. If you leave it off, you manage stock by hand.
Can I record wastage?
Yes. Wastage is recorded as its own kind of stock entry, so it shows up in your stock and you can see how much you lose.
Is this on the free plan?
Recipes, stock, the shopping list and expenses are part of Master Chef. The Free plan is ₹0 for up to 100 orders a month and one user. Master Chef is ₹399 a month, billed yearly at ₹3,999, for up to 500 orders a month and two users.
Want to try it in your kitchen?
AdugeOps grew out of one Bengaluru home kitchen, Ajji’s Homemade. The Free plan covers up to 100 orders a month. Request access and we’ll email your invite.
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