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Article Contents

  • First Steps - do not skip!
  • Creating a Recipe
    • The Input Fields
    • Adding Ingredients
    • Finalizing the Recipe
  • Additional Options
    • Restricting Recipes
    • Counting a Recipe on Your Inventory
    • Changing a Recipe’s Category
    • Copying a Recipe
    • Deactivating a Recipe

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First Steps

  • First Steps - don’t skip!
  • Creating a Recipe
  • Additional Options
    • Restricting Recipes
    • Counting a Recipe on Your Inventory
    • Changing A Recipe’s Category
    • Copying a Recipe
    • Deactivating a Recipe
When you arrive at Inventory > Recipes, you will see:
  • A Recipe Onboarding Progress banner at the top showing your coverage percentage, the number of items with recipes versus total items, revenue covered versus total revenue, and the revenue gap to 80% coverage.
  • A POS Menu Item Mappings progress bar showing how many POS items are mapped to recipes versus how many are not yet mapped.
  • Two tabs: Menu Items and Prepped Items. Use these tabs to switch between your customer-facing menu item recipes and your internal prep recipes. Toggle “Prepped Item” (or choose a Prepped Item recipe type) for sub-recipes so they appear as selectable ingredients in other recipes.
  • Upload and + New Recipe buttons to add recipes.
Be sure you have created yourRecipe Types in the Recipe Setup!

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Uploading Recipe Cards

If you already have recipes documented, you can upload them directly instead of typing everything from scratch. Garde accepts recipe cards as images, PDFs, or CSVs. For faster onboarding when you have many recipes, upload PDFs or CSVs so you can review and import them in bulk rather than one at a time. After uploading, you land on the Review Parsed Recipes screen where Garde’s AI has extracted every recipe from your file. You work through each recipe to verify ingredient names, quantities, units, and yield percentages, and to map recipes to POS menu items. For a full walkthrough of this review flow, see AI Onboarding — Reviewing Parsed Recipes.

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Prepped Items and Sub-Recipes

If you are entering a prepped item or sub-recipe (such as a sauce, dressing, or stock), toggle the “Prepped Item” button when creating the recipe. This ensures the recipe can be used as an ingredient in other recipes. Without this toggle, the item will not appear as an available ingredient when building other recipes.

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Creating a Recipe

The Input Fields
  1. Name* - We recommend giving each recipe a clear name that will be easy to search and find. Recipe names must be unique.
  2. Type* - Choose from the Recipe Types you created earlier under Recipe Setup.
  3. Yields* - Choose from the long list of options for how you want to measure the completed batch: a sixth-pan, 24 servings, two gallons, etc.
  4. Add a Picture - Click the blue “Add media” to upload as many pictures or videos as you want to help your team visualize the process or finished product (file size max is 500 MB). Click the star to indicate which photo you want to be the featured photo. Drag and drop to reorder, or click the trash can to delete images.
  5. Recipe should be restricted - See “Additional Options” below.
  6. Recipe should be inventoried - See “Additional Options” below.
  7. Shelf Life - Record the expected shelf life of this recipe for your team.
  8. Equipment - Anything you previously entered in the Recipe Setup step will show up as options to choose here. You can also add a note next to each piece of equipment chosen.
  9. Method - No rules on how you want to use this space. If you have this information in another document, you can copy and paste it here. If you want to create individual method steps complete with media, click “Add Step” and attach photos and videos to individual steps.
  10. Name * - we recommend giving each recipe a clear name that will be easy to search and find; recipe names must be unique.
  11. Type * - choose from the Recipe Types you created earlier under Recipe Setup
  12. Yields * - choose from our long list of options for how you want to measure the completed batch: a sixth-pan, 24 servings, two gallons, etc.
  13. Add a Picture - Click the blue “Add media” to upload as many pictures or videos as you want to help your team visualize the process or finished product (file size max is 500 MB). Click the star to indicate which photo you want to be the featured photo. Quickly drag and drop to reorder or click the trash can to delete images not needed. (More details on file size limits here: File Formats, Size Limits and Tech Specs.)
  1. Recipe should be restricted - see “Additional Options” below
  2. Recipe should be inventoried - see “Additional Options” below
  1. Shelf Life - this is available to record for your team to know the expected shelf life of this recipe
  2. Equipment - anything you previously inputted in the Recipe Setup step will show up as options to choose here. You can also add a note next to each equipment chosen.
  1. Method - No rules on how you want to use this space. If you have this information in another document, you can easily copy and paste it here. If you want to create individual method steps complete with media, click “Add Step”, and attach photos and videos to individual steps.
There are two approaches to accounting for yield loss in your recipes:
  1. Ingredient-level yield % — Adjust the yield percentage on individual ingredients within a recipe to account for trim, peel, or cooking loss. This is straightforward but can lead to double-counting if the same ingredient appears in a sub-recipe and a parent recipe.
  2. Prep recipe approach — Create a separate prep (sub-recipe) that accounts for all yield loss. The parent recipe then uses the output of the prep recipe as an ingredient. This avoids double-counting because the loss is captured once in the prep recipe.
Choose the approach that best fits your kitchen workflow, but be consistent to avoid double-counting waste.

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Adding Ingredients

Ingredients can be entered manually as outlined below, or you can copy and paste using AI Onboarding for Recipes to get your data in quickly.

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Copy and Paste with AI

See this article here: Copy & Paste to Enter Your Recipes

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Manually

You choose the ingredient and amount, and Garde will automatically calculate the cost for you. You can drag and drop the items or delete by clicking on the trashcan. 1. Click the blue “Add Ingredient” to kick off the process. 2. Select the product or prepared recipe item from the drop-down menu. It will automatically populate the Type. 3. You can adjust the yield here to account for any loss that occurs when preparing the recipe.
Article:Accounting for Recipe and Ingredient Yields 4. Enter the quantity , keeping in mind that it should be relative to the unit you want to specify. 5. Select the unit. The drop-down box will automatically populate all current options available (i.e. all units that don’t require a conversion). If you want to use something other than what’s available in the menu, just type it in. This will prompt a pop-up box asking for a conversion. This typically occurs if you order something and it comes in by weight, we won’t know its volume. So you are presented with a statement - “There are how many [blank] in how many Cups” - that you can rearrange using the swap button with the arrows. Once you tell our system once, it will apply that information moving forward.
Article:Recipes - Conversions 6. Cost will be calculated automatically based on your most recent purchase price. 7. Add any notes you might want to include that are relevant to a particular ingredient.

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Now continue adding all ingredients needed!

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Finalizing the Recipe

Click SAVE. Please do not forget this step. The Ingredient Total is automatically calculated and cannot be manually adjusted. On a Menu Item and Bar Item, you have two more fields: Menu Price and Food Cost percentage. These are available for you to input the information in one field, and it will automatically calculate the value for the other one. For example, if you input your Menu Price, it will tell you your Food Cost percentage. And if you want help determining the Menu Price based on a target Food Cost, then enter that percentage and you will get a corresponding Menu Price.

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Repeat these steps for all your food and beverage recipes.

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POS recipe mapping

Recipes in Garde can map directly to POS items for automated stock depletion. When a POS item sells, Garde automatically reduces the on-hand quantities of the recipe’s ingredients based on the recipe’s portioning. This keeps your inventory data closer to real-time without manual adjustments. To set up POS mapping, navigate to Inventory > Recipes, open the recipe, and link it to the corresponding POS menu item. Once linked, the recipe list will show “Linked to [POS item name]” under the recipe name so you can confirm the mapping at a glance. You can also track your overall mapping progress using the POS Menu Item Mappings progress bar at the top of the Recipes page.

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Restricting Recipes

This is a box available to check when creating or editing a recipe. When checked, then you’ll have the option to “Add Restaurant”. Select the restaurant you want to restrict the recipe to (note, you can select multiple restaurants). If the recipe is not set with any restrictions then it will show as “Global” on the page displaying all of your recipes. For more details :Restricting Recipes to Specified Restaurant Units

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Counting a Recipe on Your Inventory

This is a box available to check when creating or editing a recipe. When you check this box, you will see a dropdown list of available inventory Count Sheets. Choose the Count Sheet and the applicable Section. Click the blue “+Add to a Count Sheet” button if you want a second or third option. To remove it, click the red trashcan to the right of the count sheet name.

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Changing a Recipe’s Category

If you need to change a recipe from a Prepared Item to a Menu Item, for example, simply click on that recipe and click “Edit Recipe.” Then under the “Recipe Type,” select the appropriate Type within the new Category that you want to change it to. When you click to save it, you will get a popup notification confirming that you want your edit to change this recipe’s Category. This recipe must be given a new name; you cannot have two recipes with the same name, even if they are different categories. For more details, see:Setting Recipes to be Inventoried

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Changing A Recipe’s Category

If you realize that you need to, for example, change a recipe from a Prepped Item to a Menu Item, simply click on that recipe and click “Edit Recipe”. Then under the “Recipe Type”, select the appropriate Type within the new Category that you want to change it to. When you click to save it, you will get a pop up notification confirming that you want your edit to change this recipe’s Category. This recipe must have a new name given to it, you can’t have two recipes with the same name, even if they are different categories.

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Copying a Recipe

If you want to start with copied version of an existing recipe and then make edits to that, find the recipe you want to copy and click to open it. Use the “More Options” button in the corner to click on “Create Duplicate Recipe”. Simply click to create a new version of the recipe, give it a new name, and edit as needed. If you want to start with a copied version of an existing recipe and then make edits, find the recipe you want to copy and click to open it. Use the More Options button in the corner to click on Create Duplicate Recipe. Give it a new name and edit as needed.

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Deactivating a Recipe

If you no longer need a recipe and don’t want it to populate in any of your Garde reporting, you can deactivate it.
  1. Click on the recipe itself to open it up.
  2. From the upper righthand corner, you can toggle the “on/off” switch to turn it “off”. This deactivates it and you can no longer edit it.
  1. You can also deactivate it from within the edit recipe screen. Scroll all the way down to the bottom and click “Deactivate” to turn it off.
  1. Should you need to turn it back on, you can toggle the on/off switch again to reactivate the recipe.

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