Commissary Kitchens: Creating Products

Any Restaurant Admin within the unit where the Commissary is located can:

• Create and edit Commissary Vendor Items
• Create and edit Commissary Vendor Recipe

For a Commissary, you have two options for creating a Commissary Product that can be put on the order guide for your receiving units: 

1) Create a Commissary Recipe

Pros: Can use multiple products to generate the recipe and the price will update in real-time based on the prices of those individual ingredients
Cons: Can only include products that are categorized as "Food" or "Beverage"

2) Create a Commissary Vendor Item

Pros: You can quickly create a vendor Item and set packaging and pricing for an existing product 
Cons: Whatever price you set, it’s fixed and not dynamic it can be set (under Vendor Settings) to auto-update based on recent purchase price or can be set as manual, requiring a human to manually make a price adjustment. So, with this update, it's probably not actually a "con" anymore! 

 

COMMISSARY RECIPES

Commissaries can generate Vendor Items directly from Prepared Items Recipes and then place them on the receiving units’ order guides. The price will dynamically adjust.

Getting Started with Recipes in MarginEdge 

• From within the Commissary Unit, create a new prepared item.
• Check the box that says “This is a Commissary Vendor Recipe”
• Choose a Category — this is the Category for the Product that will be used to place this on the Order Guide
  • By default, we will generate categories using the ingredients of the recipe, splitting it up proportionally if needed.

• Packaging: this is simply a label description for the order guide, it does not convert anything and does not need to be scientific. You can edit it later by editing the Vendor Item the recipe generated.
• Quantity and Unit need to be actual measurable amounts and will require a conversion if it can't be done automatically by the system. Once set, this cannot be changed later. You can add additional packaging options if needed by editing the Vendor Item the recipe generated.

• Price is automatically set in the recipe for the item
• You can set conversions if you are creating a large batch and selling it by the piece 
• Once you save the recipe, it will automatically generate a new Vendor Item and a new Product!

Things to note:

• Item code is automatically created from the recipe name.
• If there is a change in the price of an ingredient in a Commissary Recipe, the price of the corresponding Vendor Item will update in all units in the company concept
• Recipes for the commissary can be restricted to the commissary if so desired. This means another unit won’t see the details of the recipe, but can still place an order for the product that has been generated by that recipe.

 

COMMISSARY VENDOR ITEMS 

To add a new Vendor Item, go to Vendors > Vendor Items and click on "Add new Vendor Item".

Here you can create this Item to your specifications.

1. Select your Commissary Vendor.
2. Give it an Item Name and Item Code. These can be whatever you want them to be - no rules here - but we recommend making them easily understandable for your team!
3. Select the corresponding Product that it will be attached to so that inventory is adjusted appropriately.

4. Set the Packaging. This is simply a label description for the order guide, it does not imply a conversion and does not need to be scientific.
5. Quantity and Unit need to be actual measurable amounts and will require a conversion if it can't be done automatically by the system. Once set, this cannot be changed later. You can add additional packaging options if needed by editing this Vendor Item and clicking to "Add Packaging Options".
6. Set the Price and Ratio (it will always be "1" for the first packaging created). The default settings for the Commissary will keep the price you define for the vendor item static. If, however, you want the price to auto-update, you can adjust those settings inside the Commissary Vendor. More information on that is here: Commissary Kitchens: Vendor Settings
7. Decide here if you want this Vendor Item to automatically go on the Order Guide. You can always adjust this later.