Help Centre › Ingredients

Add a Local Ingredient

⏱ About 3 minutes per ingredient

Not everything you buy comes from a supplier catalogue. You might pick things up in Lidl or Aldi, or buy from a local honey farm or vegetable grower. Prepsheets handles these as local ingredients: you create the supplier, set the price, verify the allergens yourself, and pull nutrition from Open Food Facts or USDA — so even your local buys end up fully costed, labelled and compliant.

Step 1: Create the ingredient and its supplier

Go to Ingredients and click + New Ingredient.

The Ingredients page with the New Ingredient button
  1. Give the ingredient a name at the top — you can't save it until it has one.
  2. In Supplier, type your supplier's name — say, Sams Honey, a local honey company. Since it doesn't exist yet, Prepsheets offers to create it on the fly — click Create "Sams Honey" and it's added instantly, no separate setup. The ingredient is automatically marked as a Local Ingredient.
Typing a new supplier name and creating it on the fly from the ingredient form
  1. Enter the price you pay (€20), a product code, and the weight (1 kg).
The new ingredient form with a local supplier, price, product code and weight
Tip: Everything in Prepsheets has a product code. Local suppliers usually don't — so just make one up that's meaningful to you, like SamsHoney.

Your organisation's default shelf lives apply automatically, and you can override them here if this product needs its own — for example to match the spec sheet.

Step 2: Verify the allergens yourself

With a local ingredient, you're the one confirming what's in it:

  1. In Allergens : Contains, add any allergens — for honey there are none, so it can be verified as-is.
  2. Click the source (the little edit icon under the allergens) and record where the verification came from. Pick Sourced by Tara's Beach Cafe — your own organisation — and save.
  3. Do the same for Allergens : May Contain. Once a source is set, the section flips to a green Verified stamp with the date.
The Where did this data come from dialog, choosing Sourced by Tara's Beach Cafe

Step 3: Look up the nutrition

Your local supplier probably doesn't hand you a nutrition panel — so let Prepsheets find one:

  1. In Nutrition per 100g, click Lookup Nutrition Info.
  2. Choose the USDA or Open Food Facts tab and search — e.g. raw honey. Prepsheets lists matching foods with their calories per 100g.
  3. Pick the closest match. The nutrition fills in per 100g and is automatically stamped Verified with its source — Source: Open Food Facts.
The Select Food Item dialog searching Open Food Facts for raw honey Nutrition per 100g verified from Open Food Facts

Step 4: Check the label details and save

The Label Name comes from the ingredient's name automatically, and you can change it — write Irish Honey and that's exactly what prints on your labels. The Label Description is for the ingredient's own sub-ingredients, which print in brackets after the name; for 100% honey you can leave it empty so your labels don't get bulked up.

Label information with a custom label name

Click Save Ingredient — done.

Local and managed, side by side

Search your ingredients and both kinds sit together — the local one marked Local Supplier, the catalogue one Managed Supplier — each with its price per kg ready for costing:

Search results showing a local honey and a managed supplier honey side by side

Next: build your first recipe

With ingredients in place — managed and local — you're ready to start costing recipes. Guide coming soon.

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