Recipe Costing and Nutrition Labels for Chocolatiers

Couverture, cocoa butter, nuts, cream and vanilla are most of what a chocolate costs to make, and their prices move with each harvest. Record what each distributor charges for the same couverture. KitchenSync costs every recipe at the lowest unit price on file. Enter the new price when an invoice arrives and each ganache, and each product made from it, is recosted. See ingredient pricing.

A 4-piece box, a 16-piece box and an 80 g bar each need their own serving size and net weight. Save each one as a packaging format, check the formats a recipe is sold in, and download all of its labels at once. A single bar or a 2-piece favor box has little room to print on, so it may qualify for the linear format. See the nutrition label generator.

Chocolate work involves milk, tree nuts such as hazelnut, almond and pistachio, peanuts, soy from lecithin, and wheat from cookie or wafer inclusions. KitchenSync detects them from each ingredient's USDA description and names the tree nut. Check each couverture against its spec sheet. If the sheet lists soy lecithin or milk that the description left out, edit that ingredient once and every recipe using it is corrected. See allergen detection.

When you test a chocolate from a new origin, a caramel with less sugar or a seasonal flavor, make a new version of the recipe. The versions stay linked under one name, and the one you sell is marked primary. The recipe multiplier scales every amount when a 500 g trial becomes a production batch. See recipe versioning.