Nutrition Labels and Costing for Sauce and Condiment Makers

Volume in, weight out

Sauce recipes are written in volume: a gallon of tomatoes, two cups of vinegar, a tablespoon of salt. KitchenSync accepts volume units (tsp, tbsp, cup, fl oz, pint, quart, gallon, ml, liter) alongside weight units, and converts volume to weight using USDA density data. If your ingredient is denser or thinner than the USDA entry, such as a particular hot sauce base or syrup, set a custom density for that ingredient and every recipe that uses it is calculated with it.

Yield after reduction

A sauce that simmers for an hour loses water, which concentrates its nutrition and its cost per serving. Set the recipe's cooking method (KitchenSync has 28, including reduction methods) and the yield calculator wizard estimates the cooked yield from moisture loss. If you know the real number from weighing a finished batch, enter it as the yield instead. Either way, nutrition and cost per serving are based on what ends up in the bottle. See recipe yield.

Cost per bottle

Peppers, vinegar, oil and spices are often bought from several places at different pack sizes. Record each supplier's price and KitchenSync costs the batch at the best unit price for each ingredient (multi-supplier costing is on Starter and Growth). Set the serving size and servings per container to match your bottle and you can see the ingredient cost per serving and per batch, and decide on a wholesale and retail price with real numbers. See recipe costing.

Versions as you scale

Scaling a sauce from a stockpot to a kettle often means adjusting salt, acid or thickener. Use the recipe multiplier to scale every amount, and save a linked recipe version for each adjusted formula, marking the one in production as primary. Each version keeps its own label, allergen flags and cost, so you can compare them before you change a production run.

A base sauce in many products

If one base goes into a whole line (a mother sauce, a spice blend, a pepper mash), make it its own recipe and use it as an ingredient in the others. Its nutrition carries through to every product that uses it. The recipe's cost does not carry over yet, so give the base ingredient a price yourself if you cost those products. Nested recipes are on the Starter and Growth plans.

Labels and allergens

KitchenSync generates a Nutrition Facts label in the FDA format with your serving size, servings per container and a serving description such as "1 tbsp". Save the configuration for each bottle size as a label preset and reuse it across your line, then export each label as a PNG or copy it to the clipboard. See the nutrition label generator.

Many condiments contain soy, fish, wheat, milk, eggs or sesame. KitchenSync flags the FDA's nine major allergens from USDA ingredient descriptions on every recipe; it can miss allergens in sub-ingredients that are not listed, so treat it as a check. See allergen detection.

Plans

Free covers one recipe. Starter is $14.99/month for 25 recipes and Growth is $29.99/month for 100, both with nested recipes and multi-supplier costing. See the pricing page.