Complete documentation for every feature in Kitchen Control.
Suppliers are the foundation of your ingredient costing and ordering system.
Ingredients can be linked to multiple suppliers. Kitchen Control automatically uses the cheapest cost per unit when calculating recipe costs.
Ingredients are the core of the Kitchen Control system. Every recipe, dish and allergen flows from accurate ingredient data.
Enter the pack size and pack cost to get an accurate cost per unit. If you buy by the case, enter the case size and case cost and Kitchen Control calculates the pack cost automatically.
Click Scan Ingredients Label to photograph the product packaging. Kitchen Control reads the ingredients list and automatically detects all 14 major allergens.
Scan supplier invoices to automatically update ingredient prices. Go to Dashboard → Import Invoice.
A yield is how much usable product you actually get from what you buy — so your costs reflect what's really on the plate, not what you paid for before trimming, peeling or portioning.
Skip yields and a dish can look more profitable than it really is. 800g of peeled potatoes from a 1kg bag costs about a fifth more per usable gram than the raw price suggests — multiply that across every trimmed, peeled or portioned ingredient and your GP% is quietly wrong.
You can cost recipes without yields and add them later, one ingredient at a time. Nothing breaks if you skip this — it just makes your numbers more accurate once you're ready.
Recipes combine ingredients, yields and other recipes into fully costed preparations.
Add ingredients, yields or sub-recipes as components. Enter quantities and units. Kitchen Control calculates the total cost and cost per yield unit automatically.
Set the recipe yield quantity and unit (portions, grams, litres etc.) so cost per unit displays correctly throughout the system.
Print an allergen and use-by label for any Ingredient, Yield or Recipe straight from its own page — allergens pulled automatically, shelf life calculated for you.
Labels print at 100mm × 62mm, landscape, designed for a standard 62mm continuous label roll — the same size used for till receipts and shipping labels.
Anyone on the team can print a label, whatever their role — only editing the underlying ingredient, yield or recipe is restricted to Owner, Head Chef and Sous Chef.
Both take standard Brother DK continuous label rolls (62mm) and are officially supported on Windows, Mac and ChromeOS. No vendor app or separate software is needed — printing works through the printer's own driver.
A Dish that's sold prepacked can generate a PPDS label instead of the standard prep label — a different, Natasha's-Law-aligned format showing the full ingredients list in descending order with allergens emphasised, plus a use-by date and price. Same 100mm × 62mm label size. Open a Dish and click PPDS Label.
Dishes combine recipes into customer-facing menu items with live GP% tracking.
Enter your sell price (inc. VAT) and Kitchen Control calculates gross profit percentage automatically. A target GP% is shown for reference.
Each dish has its own VAT Rate — 20% Standard, 5% Reduced, or 0% Zero-rated — so GP% is always calculated against the correct ex-VAT price. New dishes default to 20%; change it on the dish's edit form if one of yours is reduced-rate or zero-rated.
Allergens flow automatically from ingredients → recipes → dishes. No manual allergen entry needed at dish level.
Menus organise dishes for service. Dishes can be manually ordered using the ▲▼ arrows.
Dishes automatically group by category — Starters, Mains, Sides, Desserts, Children's Menu etc. Use the arrow buttons to fine-tune the order within each course.
The allergen sheet generates a Natasha's Law compliant allergen matrix automatically from your ingredient data.
Click any grey dot to manually add an allergen. Click an orange ringed dot to remove a manually added allergen. Auto-detected allergens cannot be removed.
Generate ingredient order lists from your menus based on expected covers.
Bring your ingredients, yields, recipes and dishes in from another system, or export everything back out at any time. Go to Settings → Import Data (or Export All Data), right above Sign Out. Owners and Head Chefs only.
Upload a spreadsheet — CSV or Excel, exported from anything. Kitchen Control matches its columns to the right fields automatically wherever it can, so most files need no manual setup. Every row is shown on a review screen before anything is saved, with duplicates flagged rather than silently overwritten.
An ingredient with unclear allergen data is never guessed at — it's sent to your Awaiting list. A recipe or dish component that can't be matched is still created, flagged as Missing, rather than dropped.
Export All Data downloads a single spreadsheet with every ingredient, yield, recipe, dish, menu and supplier — human-readable, and it can be uploaded straight back into Import Data if you ever need to.
Add as many logins as your kitchen needs — there's no limit on team size and no extra cost per person.
Chef (View Only) is built for a shared login — a tablet on the pass, say — where everyone needs the recipe and the allergen info, but costs and margins stay with management. This isn't just hidden on screen: the figures are withheld by the server itself, so a Chef login never actually receives them.