Order Tag Mappings for Recipes
One of the major new features that V5 introduced for the Inventory System is the ability to map Order Tags to the “ingredient” lines in Recipes.
We touched on this feature in the previous posts, but it deserves a more complete explanation, and with that we gain an understanding of how powerful this feature is, and why you should use it.
In previous posts, our “Sandwich Shop” custom built made-to-order sandwiches where we could pick the Bread, Meat, Cheese, Produce, and Condiments. Because we defined each Bread Choice as a Menu Item Product Portion, we could define Recipes according to the Bread Choice (Portion) to control the Quantity of “ingredients” that would be consumed depending on the Bread. Because of this, we could actually design some crazy looking Sandwiches which really made no sense according to the Menu Item Product Name. For example, look at this Order for a “Pulled Pork Wrap”:
The PORK WRAP shown above does not use a WRAP, and it does not use PORK. Instead it uses a Slider Bun, Meatballs, and Bacon. This rather defeats the purpose of the Name “Pulled Pork Wrap”, but the idea illustrates the power of Product.Portions and Order Tag mappings in Recipes, because that Order as configured will not consume a Wrap, nor will it consume Pork. It will consume 1 Slider Bun, 1 Meatball, and 1/2 slice of Bacon, 1/4 slice of Cheddar, and a small amount of Lettuce and Tomato, based on our Recipe for the Slider Portion and the Recipe Order Tag Mappings.
Menu Item Product Portions
The above scenario makes things a bit abstract for us and somewhat difficult to wrap our head around, so as we discuss Order Tag Mappings in Recipes, let’s go with a more “traditional model” when it comes to Portions…
We have a build-to-order Pizza Shop, and our Pizzas come in 3 sizes: Small, Medium, and Large. Menu Item Product Portions fit more “naturally” in this scenario because Sizes map to Portions in a more traditional way.
TIP: The more Portions we define, the more accurate control we will have over the Quantity of consumption of ingredients on a Pizza as a Whole, Half, or Quarter, in any base size of Small, Medium, or Large. But keep in mind: more Portions necessitates defining more Recipes!
So we could define our Pizza Portions like this:
Small
Medium Whole
Medium Half
Large Whole
Large Half
Large Quarter
But to simplify things for the purpose if explanation, the Portions we will concentrate on for our Pizza Menu Item Products will be these:
Small
Medium
Large
Here are a few Menu Item Product examples with identical Portion Lists:
Order Tags
Here is a quick look at some of our Order Tag Groups which contain modifiers for things we can put on our Pizza …
Recipes using Order Tag Mappings (no Containers)
The idea of Mapping Order Tags to Recipe Lines is that the Recipe will only consume those items which have been selected on the Order.
Cheese Pizza Small
Now we can Clone that ^ and change the Portion and Unit Quantities for Medium …
Clone the Recipe again and change the Portion and Unit Quantities for Large …
Let’s see how it works so far. We place a few Orders …
The 1st Order will consume only Mozza (5 oz).
The 2nd Order will consume only Parmesan (4 oz).
The 3rd Order will consume both Mozza (12 oz) and Parmesan.(8 oz).
Let’s build the Recipe for Small Meat Lover Pizza. We can start by Cloning the Small Cheese Pizza, changing the Product, and Portion, so that the Cheese choices are already in the Recipe.
So that ^ is getting to be a big list of Items for a Recipe, and we haven’t even added the Items for Veggies (10 Tags), Sauces (8 Tags), or Crust. By the time we’re done all that, the Recipe will contain at least 30 Items for all the Order Tags. And that is just a single pizza Recipe for 1 size.
What happens when we have 10 Pizzas, each with 3 sizes? That makes 30 Recipes. We can easily Clone a “well thought out” Recipe that contains all the correct Items, and just change the Product, Portion and Quantity of Units.
But what happens when we add a new Meat choice? Or Cheese choice? Or Veggie? Or Sauce? We will need to edit 30 Recipes to include the new choices. This leads me to why you should use Inventory Containers…
Recipes using Order Tag Mappings and Containers
We introduced the concept of the Inventory Product “Container” in previous posts. Now we will demonstrate what makes this concept so powerful and easy to use when it comes to Recipe creation.
First, let’s configure our “CHEESES Pizza” Container …
We can Clone the above Inventory Product Container for our other “Ingredient Groups”, and simply change the Container Name (Inventory Product Name) …
Now let’s create the Recipe for the “CHEESES Pizza” Inventory Product Container, for the Small Unit/Portion, Medium Unit/Portion and the Large Unit/Portion. We will do our Order Tag mappings in the Container Recipes…
New Cheese choice? Edit 3 Recipes instead of 30.
The only differences in the above Recipes are the Portion and the Quantity of Units. Now if we want to add a new Cheese choice, we simply edit 3 Recipes (Small, Medium, Large) and add the new Cheese choices. This is a far cry better than editing 30 Pizza Recipes to add new Cheese choice to each of them when made without Containers.
Before going on to showing how we use these Containers in the MASTER Product Recipes, we need to create the “MEATS Pizza” Recipes for Small, Medium, Large, and do the same for Veggies and Sauces. When it’s all done, we have these 12 Container Recipes…
Now let’s see how easy it is to build the Recipe for that Meat Lover Pizza using Containers instead of individual ingredients…
The Recipe on the Left for Medium Meat Lover compared to our older Small Meat Lover on the Right shows how simple the Master Menu Item Product Recipes can be. Notice there are no mapped Order Tags - we mapped them already in our Container Recipes. Also we match the Container Recipe Unit/Portion to the Unit of the Master Product Unit. One of the great things about this type of Master Recipe is that it never needs to be touched ever again. Instead, we modify Container Recipes to suit our ingredient additions.
Making the Large Meat Lover Recipe is as easy as Cloning and changing the Product, Portion, and Units. Here is how it all ties together, from the Order Tags, to the Inventory Product Container Recipes, to the Master Menu Item Product Recipe…