Adding and Managing Ingredients

Add ingredients with cost, unit, supplier, and stock levels to track your bakery inventory.

What You'll Learn

  • How to add ingredients with accurate costs
  • Why cost precision matters
  • Common mistakes that break recipe costing

Why Ingredients Are the Foundation

Ingredients are the foundation of everything in BakeOnyx — recipe costs, inventory tracking, purchase orders, and profit calculations all start here. If your ingredients are wrong, everything downstream is wrong too.

Adding an Ingredient

  1. Go to Ingredients → Add New
  2. Name: e.g., "Unsalted Butter"
  3. Unit: The base unit you track stock in (g, kg, ml, L, oz, lb, or pcs)
  4. Cost per unit: What you pay per base unit (e.g., $0.005 per gram)
  5. Category: Dairy, Flour, Sugar, Chocolate, etc.
  6. Reorder point: Stock level that triggers a low-stock alert
Fastest way: Use the Master Ingredient Library — 80+ common baking ingredients with units and categories pre-set. Just add your local cost.

Cost Precision Matters

If you buy 2.5kg of butter for $12.50, that's $0.005 per gram. This precision matters when costs add up across 20 ingredients in a recipe. A $0.001 rounding error per gram becomes $0.50 per kg — significant at scale.

Common Mistakes

  • Not setting cost per unit — recipes will show $0 cost
  • Wrong unit — if your recipe uses grams but your ingredient is in kilograms, ensure unit conversion is set up
  • Forgetting reorder points — you won't get low-stock alerts without them

Linking to Suppliers

Optionally link each ingredient to a supplier. This powers purchase orders — when stock is low, BakeOnyx knows which supplier to order from and can auto-suggest draft POs.

Next Steps

Cost Changes Now Cascade to Products (Spec 039)

As of Spec 039 Phase 4, editing an ingredient's cost per unit automatically cascades:

  1. All recipes using this ingredient recompute Recipe.cost
  2. All products linked to those recipes recompute Product.cost
  3. A margin check runs — if any product is now below your target margin (default 60%), you get an email (Growth+ tier, max one per bakery per day) and a dashboard banner appears

This means: update an ingredient cost once, and you'll immediately see accurate pricing across your catalogue — plus an alert if anything dropped below profitability.

Read about margin alerts →

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