cookunity recipe standards

Contents

I. The importance of Menu Item data and what it's used for

II. How do we create Menu Items and what are the requirements?

III. Making Edits to Existing Menu Items

IV. Menu Item Recipe Review

V. Communications

I.The importance of Menu Item data and what it's used for

What is Menu Item Data?

It’s all the information in the below 3 categories:

- Build Recipe - The makeup of a thing we’re going to sell (portioned meal itself)

- Sub-Recipe - A recipe that holds a lot of details but we’re not going to sell on its own (a component part of the Build Recipe)

- Ingredients - The things we’re going to purchase, used in both types of recipes

What does CookUnity use this information for?

We use the menu item data set for the following important things:

- Costing of the items we’re going to sell aka our theoretical food cost.

- Purchasing the specific ingredients in the quantities you need for production. We multiply your recipe by the number of items sold for the current production week.

- Cooking during production (if we don’t cook from the recipes, then the usage, cost, and nutritional values will be inaccurate) This is a major step that everyone needs to fully implement and commit to.

- Nutritional Values and Item Labeling which is required by law and is much different standard compared to items produced for immediate consumption.

II. How do we create Menu Items and what are the requirements?

What is the process?

Concept Approval > Submit a Tested Recipe Draft > Culinary Engineering > Sourcing > Adjustments, Review, and Approval > Photography > Scheduling and Communications

Concept Approval

Led by the Portfolio team and followed up by your Chef Success Manager. They will provide insight into what customers are demanding and what would fit well into a market's active menu pool.

Items are approved by CookUnity through a [concept approval form](https://sites.google.com/cookunity.com/chefs/home), where the Chef team will give the following for each proposed item:

- title (main component)

- subtitle (other components)

- description (something interesting about this idea/item)

- list of components (i.e. list of items that will go into the final plate including the packaging)

Please be creative and have fun with this part, these don’t need to read like a glossary and can have some of your culinary personality and/or brand's style to them. If your concept is approved it will go to the next step. If not there will be some feedback to suggest a change, possibly because we think it won’t work well in this format or there are already several similar meals in the pool. Either-way we’ll work to get something approved!

Submit a Tested Recipe Draft

Once an item concept is approved, Chefs submit a menu item recipe with all the required details via our database (parsley) portal for which you will receive a training session (or the past method of using a data sheet)

CookUnity has standards for the design of the menu items:

- We need all recipes that are submitted by you to be tested first so we know you’re giving us accurate information. Remember we’re using this info for several important controls, this is not just a list of ingredients.

- Final weight between 12-16oz for main meals. SKU expansion items targets will be set as we expand the categories. Meal weight/portioning consistency during production must be +/-10% of published weights.

- Cost targets are regional but the idea is to have a balanced portfolio, some less expensive, and some (with certain proteins) will be more expensive. Just like any menu!

- Standard protein portion sizes and trim/ cook yields are provided and are used for the majority of item. The exception is a dish like “chicken wings”, where inherently the protein portion will be larger than a meal. This way we know: standards are set for cooking, meaning we make usage more predictable for both Chefs and CU. It means it a fair playing field for chef teams, and consistent for eaters across meals. We will publish current protein yields going forward.

- Food must fit neatly into the pulp fiber tray or other containers and can not protrude over the top edge.

- The recipe must be able to be executed at scale within existing CookUnity facilities and must be able to be evenly portioned. Meaning if you make gumbo for example, you should aim to portion the soup and protein separately or cut the protein small so you don’t need to, that way you know each meal gets the same amount.

- Ingredients/quantities listed in the final approved recipe will be used for ordering, allergens, and consumer labels, and therefore must be the ingredients/quantities used by your team

Here are the requirements for submitting a complete draft menu item recipe

1. Build Recipe

- Name

- Always to a yield of 1 each

- Name, Qty, Unit of Measure (oz, gr, floz, ea) of each item (ingredient or sub-recipe) that is going into the container when plating

- What packaging is used

- Accurate heating instructions

- Plating instructions - think about how you want the staff to portion and plate the food and write it down

2. Sub-recipes

- Name (Just the name of what it is as these can be reused in other recipes too)

- Always a tested accurate yield and never in just 1 portion.** We want production-sized sub-recipes. If a sub-recipe can be batched on a sheet pan or in a hotel pan then that size is great for scaling but not required.

- Name, Qty, Unit of Measure (oz, gr, floz, ea) of each item (ingredient or sub-recipe)

- Processing instructions - simple and concise is great.

3.Ingredients for both build and sub-recipes

- Chefs should be as specific as possible when it comes to ingredients so we can source and stock the items you need. We have a huge ingredient list already and are willing to get more if we agree there is a need.

Culinary Engineering

We say engineer instead of data entry because in most cases this info needs to be altered to work for the 4 major outputs. It’s a skillset and not data entry.

A member of our recipe squad will be assigned to your work and will review your items for the purpose of making sure the information provided works for the 4 main outputs: costing, usage, nutritional values, and your chef team in operations.

They may require a meeting with you or send questions over email. Please respond to the best of your ability.

Sourcing

The recipe squad will submit new items or market-sourcing requests to the supply chain team. Once the supply chain team has sourced and entered the new items into the database they will alert the recipe squad it's complete.

Review and approval

The recipe squad will add the new ingredients to your recipes and make any adjustments they think are required due to sourcing.

They will make a final review with the Chef team (chef owner/corporate lead and now your local lead and CU local operations lead are required) to confirm you’re happy with all the details, sourcing, and any substitutes should they be needed.

The recipe squad will then review them with the Finance team and work to get your items approved. You’ll be alerted if any adjustments are needed.

Photography

Photographs are taken at least twice monthly in all markets by our marketing team. They will schedule this with you so you can come to our facility to make the recipes and present them for photos. The approved recipes will be used to the make the meals and photos can be taken plated for the website and also in packaging for a control of what the final meal looks like. On photo day heating instructions should be tested by local chefs and CU teams to ensure those are correct. This is one of the biggest customer complaints. Please alert your recipe squad contact if you think there is a recipe change needed. After the photo shoot, we should not aim to change anything about this item.

Scheduling and Communications

Chef Success will ask you for a launch date earlier in this process and confirm with you around the time of the photoshoot. Once a date is confirmed by the chef team, meaning you agree your local team can prepare the new item they will alert the menu planning team to add this new item to the menu. Local chef teams must receive training before the launch date.

Viola, there is now a new item in your active menu pool!

III. Making Edits to Existing Menu Item

If we do a great job in the first place we don’t need many edits. Making edits is more complicated than it seems as the information is online and also printed. In fact, there is no perfect time in the week to change an item that is live (WoW) so we aim to minimize edits. We separate these into two categories, ingredient changes and everything else. Long story short, ingredient changes are much more involved than the rest.

How do I request an edit?

Nothing has changed, there is still a form you fill out and we’ll investigate/make the edit and let you know. Do not use parsley for requesting edits (apologies for any confusion there). General edits outside of ingredients changes will be made swiftly.

Ingredient Change

Changing ingredients is where we need to be most careful. Several times I can recall someone from CU operations telling me we need to edit a recipe because the chef wanted to change the ingredients and already has. **Requesting is okay, and changing is okay via the process but changing on a whim or doing it before we have a chance to update allergen, purchase, cost, labeling, and merchandising data cannot happen. The recipe data is the source of truth for all systems (CU and Chefs) to follow.

Want to change Hanger Steak with Summer Beans to Hanger Steak with Butternut Squash? Great, that is going to be considered a NEW MENU ITEM so submit a concept approval form with that note and we’ll get it done.

Changes to sub-recipes and smaller build recipe variations (e.g. cilantro or no cilantro as a garnish) we aim to not make changes like these but of course, can. It’s important to know the dish is great by the time we get through the photo stage in the item onboarding process. This is a bandwidth issue for us to make these changes all the time.

We may need photos so expect anywhere from 2-4 weeks to execute ingredient changes.

IV. Menu Item Recipe Review/Audit

We’re conducting an audit of all current menu item recipes. You may have seen that announced in an email and you may have been contacted already for the purpose of confirming a change or a request for missing information. If not, the recipe squad members will reach out to you before the end of October. Please be ready to answer their questions promptly as I’ve explained throughout this, the importance of this info being complete and CU/Chefs being aligned. We’ll be covering all the information above in the recipe sections to bring the existing recipes up to date. The reason we’re investing in this painful and expensive exercise is so we can trust the recipe as a source of true for eaters, business needs, and can best serve you in the operation. As we move closer to locking down ingredients in the operation and pulling them for you, we can see completeness issues rising. This is one of the keys to success and we need to get over the hump to be a scalable operation.

The best way to make the audit less painful is to have your subject matter expert on production recipes email us the recipe book they use. We will need them to capture some yields but that means you will have a lot fewer questions.

When Edits are complete, chef-owners, team leads (if we have their email) local culinary manager, and MD will be notified via email.

Here is a yield form that you can use during production if you need your team to log yields for any reason. Please have a CU culinary or ops staff member confirm the yield before submitting it so there is no question afterward. If you’re having issues getting the right amount of food then we may need a yield on your products and we’ll reach out.

V. Communications

Don’t worry this is the last topic and I’m almost done! Comms for each of the above sections are super important.

- All chef partners have a Chef Success Account manager set as your key contact. If you don’t know your CSM then email us we’ll let you know.

- For new menu items and edits we need to know who you designate as the main point of contact, sometimes it's the chef partner and sometimes there is another person. If you want to change that person at any time just let your CSM know.

- For approving concepts you or (your designated POC) will work with the portfolio team and your CSM will be in the loop.

- For creating and approving the actual items a recipe squad member will get you or (your designated POC) through the approval phase and then a CSM will take over to help schedule photos and go live.

- Your CSM is responsible for letting you know that new items have been scheduled to go live.

- For recipe edits a recipe squad person will communicate with you or (your designated POC) to confirm the next steps and an email will be sent to: the person who submitted the request, the chef owner and lead on file, the local ops manager and MD to let you know the change has been made.

- For the recipe review, a recipe squad member will reach out to you or (your designated POC) about the needed info. We need this to be handled as swiftly as possible.

- IMPORTANT - When changes are made or when new items go live, we need a good way to communicate with your operational team, other than email. This is out of our hands at the moment and we’re seeing the need to ensure this is completed.

Your team in the kitchen needs to know:

- Always reference the parsley recipes. We’re working on a way for you to use your own device to view them in a convenient way so stay tuned for that.

- When an ingredient or significant recipe edit has been made

- When a new item is going live and they need to be trained in advance

Thanks for your time on these subjects! This is not the end but the beginning of our next phase in creating scalable operations and a more frictionless environment. Please let your CSM know if you have any questions, comments, or concerns. If you have specific feedback, as always, feel free to email me directly.