Recipe costing that follows your real prices.
Dictate a recipe in 35 seconds or snap the card. methodus builds the costed fiche technique: yields, preps, allergens, margin. And the cost stays honest as your supplier prices move.
Watch a fiche cost itself.
The real product, no voiceover: an invoice lands, an ingredient price moves, the fiche re-costs, the margin updates.
Voice to fiche in 35 seconds
Say it the way you'd brief a commis. methodus structures ingredients, grammages, method and the 14 INCO allergens into a fiche the team can read mid-service.
Yields and preps, not list prices
AP to EP on every ingredient, and house-made preps costed as batches. The demi-glace carries its true cost into every dish that uses it.
Margin per item, always current
Pour cost behind the bar, food cost in the kitchen, target markup on both. You see which items hold their margin and which quietly leak.
The fiche is the standard
One card the whole house reads: exact measures, progression, plating, allergens. A new hire learns from the fiche, not from whoever happens to be on shift.
3 to 5%
Typical gap between theoretical and actual food cost in a kitchen (Restaurant365, MarginEdge). Costed fiches are where closing it starts.
Change a price, every fiche recalculates
Ingredient prices come from your invoices. When butter moves, every recipe that touches butter re-costs itself. No spreadsheet reopened, no month-end surprise.
The binder, before and after
- Recipes in a binder nobody opens mid-service
- Costs from last quarter's spreadsheet
- Scaling a batch means a calculator and scrap paper
- Allergens passed verbally between shifts
- A new hire shadows someone for three weeks
- Fiches on the tablet at the pass, found in two taps
- Costs that follow your invoices, line by line
- Half to ten times in one tap, units converted, garnish left alone
- The 14 INCO allergens detected from the ingredients, printed on every card
- The fiche generates its own quiz; certified in days
A library, not a pile.
Three hundred recipes is where most systems collapse into a folder called 'FINAL v3'. The library holds the line instead.
- Folders you drag recipes into, tags you filter by, search that lands in two keystrokes.
- Bar and kitchen live in separate libraries, each with its own logic: specs and pour costs on one side, grammages and yields on the other.
- Photos on the recipe and on individual steps, so plating is shown, not described.
- Version history on every fiche: see what changed, who changed it, and roll back when the winter menu returns.
Scale the batch, not the mistakes.
From half a batch to ten times, every quantity recalculates with unit conversions built in, and the rounding stays kitchen-realistic.
- One tap from 0.5× to 10×: test batch on Tuesday, banquet on Saturday, same fiche.
- Units convert as they scale: 80 spoonfuls of anything becomes a weight you can actually measure.
- It knows what not to scale. Garnish, 'to taste', the bay leaf: flagged and left alone instead of multiplied into nonsense.
- Costs scale with the quantities, so the banquet's food cost is known before you say yes to the booking.
The 14 allergens, tracked at the source.
Allergen truth lives in the ingredients, not in someone's memory. methodus reads them from the fiche itself.
- The 14 INCO allergens detected automatically from the ingredient list, with manual override when you know better.
- A customer-facing allergen card exports straight from the fiche, in your service language.
- Gluten-free, dairy-free and vegan adaptations live on the fiche, so 'can you make it without…' has a written answer.
- If an incident happens, it's logged against the recipe with the allergen state at that moment. You have the paper.
One fiche, eleven ways out.
The same fiche prints differently for the line cook, the manager, the trainer and the guest. Eleven PDF formats between kitchen and bar, A4 or Letter, costs and allergens shown or hidden per audience.
- Kitchen: full spec, prep sheet, line card, training guide, service card, manager summary, customer allergen card.
- Bar: full spec, compact service card, menu-engineering view, one-page manager dashboard.
- Each export in your working language, with allergen labels translated.
Forty languages in. One standard out.
The chef dictates in the language they cook in: extraction works in 40+ languages, and the fiche comes out in your working language, with per-language translations a tab away. The same fiche then generates the quiz your team trains on, so the standard you costed is the standard they learn.
Common questions
Do I have to type my recipes in?
No. Voice, photo, text or a URL. Most operators dictate: 35 seconds of speech becomes a structured, costed fiche you correct in place.
Where do the prices come from?
From your supplier invoices, scanned or forwarded by email. Each ingredient keeps its latest real price and a history. You can always set a price by hand.
Does it handle preps and sub-recipes?
Yes. A prep is costed as a batch, total cost divided by yield, and every fiche that uses it inherits the right per-unit cost, level after level.
Bar and kitchen?
Both. Cocktail specs with pour cost behind the bar, dishes with grammages and yields in the kitchen. One library for the whole house.
Can it scale a recipe for a banquet?
Yes. Half a batch to ten times in one tap, units converted, rounding kept realistic, and garnish or 'to taste' lines left alone. The cost scales with it, so you know the banquet's food cost before you confirm.
How do I keep 300 recipes organized?
Folders, tags and instant search, with bar and kitchen in separate libraries. Every fiche keeps its version history, so old menus can come back without archaeology.
Does it do nutrition labels?
No, and we won't pretend otherwise. methodus can estimate nutrition to give you an order of magnitude, but it's a costing and standards tool, not a labeling tool. Compliant labels need a dietitian.
Everything I have is in Excel and a binder.
Bring both. Photograph the binder pages, paste the spreadsheet, or import the menu: methodus extracts the recipes, and nothing gets retyped by hand.
Not ready for a tool?
Take the free fiche technique template: a complete, print-ready PDF example with grammages, method, allergens and cost.
Get the free template →See one of your recipes at its real cost.
Twenty minutes with the founder. Bring one recipe; leave with its real cost.
14-day trial, no credit card.