Creating a Recipe
A recipe tells Iraca what ingredients — and how much of each — go into one batch of a finished product. Once a recipe exists, you can schedule production runs, track ingredient consumption, and calculate cost of goods sold (COGS) automatically.
New to recipes? Iris can walk you through your first one, from the ingredients to what it costs and a first batch.
Before you start
You'll need at least one finished good product (the recipe output) and at least one ingredient already created in your product catalog. Ingredients can be other finished goods or supplies (packaging, labels, gloves, boxes, etc.).
Step-by-step
- Go to Production → Recipes and click New Recipe.
- Fill in the Recipe Name — this is what appears on production runs and reports.
- Choose the Output Product — the finished item this recipe produces.
- Set the Output Quantity — how many finished units one batch makes. For most products that's 1: one bag, one jar. The ingredient amounts you add below are what that batch uses, so a 2 lb bag of hibiscus is Output Quantity 1 with 2 lb of hibiscus flowers. The size of the bag belongs in the ingredient amount, not here.
- (Optional) Fill in Labour Cost per Unit and Overhead Cost per Unit — fixed costs per output unit. They are part of the recipe's cost per unit from the moment you save them, alongside the ingredients, so a product with a blank Unit Cost is costed from this recipe right away; a production run records what a batch actually cost. See How Iraca decides what a unit costs.
- Set Expected Operators — the default number of people working a production session. This pre-fills the operator count when you start a run and drives per-operator consumable calculations.
Adding ingredients
Click Add Ingredient for each item that goes into the batch. For each row:
- Product — search by name or SKU. Both finished goods and supplies appear.
- Quantity — how much of this ingredient one standard batch consumes.
- Unit — the unit this amount is written in. It starts as the ingredient's own unit, and the list offers only units that convert to it, so flowers stocked in lb can be written as oz or g. See Units of measure.
- Quantity type — how that quantity scales when a run is bigger or smaller. See below.
- Note (optional) — a reminder for operators, e.g. "Organic certified."
Quantity types
Most ingredients scale with the size of the batch, but not all of them do. The Quantity type tells Iraca which rule to apply when it works out how much to deduct from stock:
| Type | Scales with | Use it for |
|---|---|---|
| Per unit produced (default) | Batch size | Ordinary ingredients — flour, resin, labels. Double the run, double the amount. |
| Per run (flat) | Nothing | Anything consumed once per batch regardless of size — a filter cartridge, a cleaning kit, a single batch record sheet. |
| Per operator per hour | Staff × time | Consumables people get through as they work — gloves, hairnets, sanitiser wipes. |
Per unit produced is the default and the right answer for most rows. If your recipe is for 100 units and a run produces 200, every per-unit quantity doubles.
Per run ingredients are deliberately not multiplied. One cartridge per batch stays one cartridge whether you make 10 units or 10,000.
Per operator per hour is the only type Iraca can't fully work out in advance, because it depends on how long the run actually takes. When you schedule a run it plans for one hour per operator, and it adjusts to the real elapsed time when you complete the run. If you change the operator count as you start a run, these quantities are recalculated before stock is deducted.
Packaging and labels
Packaging and labels are ingredients like any other. Add the bag or jar each unit goes into, and the label stuck on it, as rows in the ingredient list, usually at 1 per unit produced. Their cost is then part of each unit's COGS, and a run deducts them from stock.
For packaging that holds several units, such as a case of 12, enter the share one unit uses: 1 ÷ 12 = 0.0833 per unit produced. If a run produces 120 units, Iraca deducts 10 cases.
Saving and editing
Click Save to create the recipe. You can edit any recipe at any time — future runs will use the updated ingredient list and quantities. Existing completed runs are not retroactively changed.
Generating a nutrition label from this recipe
Once a recipe is saved, a Recipe Nutrition Calculator appears on its detail page. It blends the nutrition data of every ingredient — scaled by how much of the batch each one makes up — into a Nutrition Facts profile for the output product, so you don't have to enter those values by hand.
- Enter the unit weight — how many grams one output unit of the recipe produces.
- Optionally set a serving size (defaults to
100g) and servings per batch (calculated automatically from the unit weight if you leave it blank). - Choose Calculate to preview the blended nutrition without saving anything.
- Choose Sync to Product to save the result as the output product's nutrition profile. Syncing again later — after you edit the recipe — overwrites the previous synced profile with the new numbers.
The calculator shows a coverage percentage: the share of the recipe's ingredients that were actually included in the blend. An ingredient is left out, and listed below the coverage bar, for one of two reasons:
- No nutrition data — that ingredient's own product doesn't have a nutrition profile yet. Add one (Manual Entry or USDA Lookup) from the ingredient's product page, then recalculate.
- Unit can't be converted to weight — the blend needs every ingredient's quantity in grams, and can only convert weight units (g, kg, mg, oz, lb). If an ingredient's quantity above is in a volume unit (cup, tbsp, ml, …) or a count unit ("unit", "each"), Iraca can't convert it to grams without knowing that ingredient's density, so it's excluded rather than guessed. Fix this by changing the ingredient's quantity in the list above to a weight unit.
If the recipe is edited after its nutrition profile was last synced, a banner appears on the recipe page reminding you to re-sync so the label reflects the current ingredient list.
Coverage below 100% still produces a savable profile — it's just missing the contribution of the excluded ingredients. Don't publish a label from a partial blend without reviewing which ingredients were skipped and why.
See Creating a Nutrition Profile for the other ways to build a nutrition profile (manual entry, USDA lookup, or generating from a recipe via the standalone editor).
Duplicating a recipe
Open a recipe and click the duplicate button to create a copy. Useful for creating variants (e.g. different batch sizes or flavor variations) without starting from scratch.