Understanding Yield Count and Yield Units
This article will help you understand how to choose the right yield count and yield units for your recipes.
The Basics
We'll cut right to the chase here and then provide more details. The long and the short of it is that every recipe has a yield. The fields for Yield Count and Yield Units help you decide how to set this up for your recipes.
Yield Count is always a number.
Yield Units is a word you use that makes sense to you based on how you use your recipes.
Examples:
Your Chocolate Chip cookie recipe yield 200 cookies
- Yield Count: 200
- Yield Units: Cookies
Your Salad Dressing recipe yields 5000 ml
- Yield Count: 5000
- Yield Units: ml
Your Special Beef Roast yields 20 servings
- Yield Count: 20
- Yield Units: servings
Advanced Topics
Depending on how you use your recipes (especially if you use your recipes as sub-recipes or ingredients in other recipes) you will want to think about how you set up your yields carefully. The reason for this is that your portion costs are calculated and determined based on the yield count. If you have a recipe with a yield count of 20, the portion cost will be displayed as the total recipe cost divided by 20.
Let's say in the salad dressing example above you know that your recipe yields 5000ml but you never use your recipe that way. What you do is you portion the recipe into 25ml containers that you serve alongside your salads to customers. In this case, you may want to set up your yield differently. You do a little math to see that your yield is 5000ml / 25ml portions = 200 portions. So you may choose to set up your recipe as:
- Yield Count: 200
- Yield Units: portions
But if we take it one step further, maybe you have two different sized dressing portions that you use depending on the size of salad ordered. Perhaps a 25ml portion and a 45ml portion.
In this case what you can do is leave the original salad dressing recipe with a yield of 5000ml, and create two sub-recipes, one each for the 25ml portion and the 45ml portion. You could create these something like follows:
- Name: Small Salad Dressing Portion
- Yield Count: 1
- Yield Units: 25ml portion
- Name: Large Salad Dressing Portion
- Yield Count: 1
- Yield Units: 40ml portion
Then you would add your main salad dressing recipe as an "ingredient" or "sub-recipe" to these portioned recipes in the desired quantity.
There is a tremendous amount of flexibility around how you can set up your recipes so it's worth thinking about how you use your recipes to make good choices about your yield count and yield units.
As always, if you have any questions, let us know!