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What Is a Commissary Kitchen?

A commissary kitchen is a central production facility where you prep food, batch recipes, and send finished products to your other restaurant locations. It serves as a shared kitchen — one location handles the prep work so your individual restaurants can focus on service. If you operate multiple locations and find yourself duplicating prep work across all of them, a commissary setup can save significant time and improve consistency.
Commissary kitchens are best suited for multi-unit operations that share recipes across locations. If you are prepping the same sauces, proteins, or baked goods at multiple locations, centralizing that work into one commissary can reduce labor costs and improve consistency.
Garde’s commissary feature provides a complete system for managing that process. You create recipes, and those become vendor items that populate an order guide — which then become products that are inventoried and used in reporting. The entire chain stays connected.

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Commissary Dashboard and Navigation

The commissary operates on a separate dashboard within munchinsights.com. Commissary staff manage everything from their own dashboard, while receiving locations place orders through their respective dashboards. Within the commissary dashboard, the Commissary section in the sidebar contains three sub-pages:
  • Incoming Orders — where the commissary sees and manages orders placed by receiving locations. This is your central hub for reviewing, editing, and fulfilling requests.
  • Order Guides — where the commissary sets up what items each location can order. You control the product catalog, pricing, and which locations have access.
  • Ordering Locations — where the commissary manages which locations are authorized to place orders. Add or remove locations as your operation grows.

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Key Features

  • Transfer products and recipes from one central location to multiple locations, all within Garde
  • Input your own recipes with up-to-date, dynamic pricing
  • Generate order guides so your teams know exactly what’s available
  • Place, track, and edit orders — all within Garde
  • Get email notifications whenever orders are created
  • Generate Prep Lists and Pack Lists for easy planning
  • Add notes on orders for clear communication between locations
  • See transfers reflected on Garde Performance Reports
  • Sync everything with your accounting system as journal entries
The goal is to streamline the process of placing, tracking, and fulfilling orders between your locations.

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How Does This Work?

  1. We set up your Commissary Kitchen as a Vendor within its home location.
  2. You create commissary recipes that Garde automatically converts to a vendor item and product for easy ordering. Prices stay updated automatically based on your purchases.
  3. If needed, you create vendor items with a set price, and Garde automatically converts them to products available for ordering.
  4. Set up the order guide for all connected restaurants to use when ordering commissary products.
  5. Your other restaurants place an order from the commissary kitchen vendor, which generates an order and a resulting invoice for full tracking of inventory and costs.
  6. Managers can easily see, edit, and fulfill inbound orders.
  7. Download a Prep List that summarizes total orders and a Pack List that helps organize deliveries.
  8. Set up the appropriate payment accounts and export all transfers as journal entries to your accounting system.
Once setup is complete, the commissary location gains access to the Incoming Orders page in the Commissary section of the sidebar, where all inbound orders from receiving locations appear. This feature is designed for you if: This feature handles transfers from a central commissary kitchen to your other restaurants. It is restricted to units that share the same Company Concept in Garde. One or more locations are designated as the “Commissary” — those are the only units allowed to create Commissary Items and manage Commissary orders. All other units in the same Company Concept can place orders the same way they would with any other vendor. This feature is designed for you if:
  • You want commissary orders to reflect the latest ingredient costs when recording transfer expenses.
This feature is not a good fit if:
  • You want to mark up the prices of recipes/products being transferred
  • Your commissary sells items to outside companies and you need to track those expenses/sales
  • You want to sell commissary products back to the commissary itself
Garde can support a unit having multiple Commissary Kitchens set up.
If you have recipes or products made at your commissary that also need to be transferred back to the commissary, you can use Internal Transfers for moving products and costs in the other direction.

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How Is This Different from Internal Transfers?

The key difference is recipes. Internal Transfers can only move products — not recipes. That works well for shifting defined products back and forth between locations. However, when you need to move batched recipes, prepped cambros of food, or house-made sauces, the Commissary feature is the right tool. It converts those recipes into products ready for transfer. One important limitation: Commissary can only move items from the commissary to your other locations. If you need to send something back, use an internal transfer for the return.

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Learn more about the Commissary feature: