Many food businesses are managing thousands of recipes within ReciPal. Meal prep businesses, for example, have everchanging menus with new options being created and old ones retired on a daily basis. If your business manages an array of recipes, we’ve added a bulk update feature that makes it easy to stay organized, export exactly what you need, and take actions at scale to save time and streamline your processes.

How it works

From your recipe dashboard, there’s a column on the far left that allows you to select multiple recipes that you’d like to take actions on (note: this will only appear if you have more than 10 recipes and an active subscription). You can select all of your recipes at once or hand pick individual ones. Further, you can filter your recipes by date, tag, or status and then easily select all recipes that match your criteria.

Once you’ve selected recipes, you can use the the Actions options (on the top of your dashboard) to make bulk updates including:

• Archive or restore recipes
• Add or remove tags
• Export CSV files from any page (Recipes, Labels, Ingredient Lists, Allergens, Costs, Nutrition Breakdown)

How Bulk Updates Add Value

There are many use cases where this feature is invaluable. Let’s look at a few examples:

1. Archiving seasonal menu items

Let’s say you have a seasonal menu that you are about to retire. You want to keep all the recipes, but don’t want anyone accidentally selecting something that’s now off the menu. In the past, you’d have to individually archive each of these recipes. Now, you can handle this all in one action.

If you hadn’t done so already, you can select all of the seasonal items and add a tag to them at once - let’s call it “Fall 2024”. You could even add multiple tags at once.

From there, you can archive these recipes in one click. If you ever need to reference them again the tag will help you quickly find your Fall 2024 menu items, but they’re out of the way of your active recipes for organizational purposes.

2. Preparing documentation for regulatory compliance or partners

Let’s say you have a partner, Acme Co., that needs the unrounded nutritional values per 100g for all the products you supply them in order to be integrated onto their sales portal. In this case, the bulk updates feature saves you the time of exporting each individual report. At the same time, it produces a more streamlined document for your partner by providing all of the information together in one file.

Here, let’s imagine you were already using tags to indicate which products specific wholesalers carry. You’d just filter for Acme Co. and select all. From there, click download spreadsheets and select the “Nutrition Breakdowns”.

3. Internal Research & Development

Let’s say you have a few different recipes you’d like to compare against each other. Maybe they’re variants of the same recipe and you’re looking to optimize the nutrition. Or, maybe they’re all recipes of the same category (hot sauce, for example) and you want to compare costs and streamline your offering.

The bulk actions make it easier to compare recipes against any dimension you need. Simply select the recipes you want and the report that provides the data you need. You’ll be able to download one CSV file with each recipe’s information organized for easy comparison purposes.

So here, I might filter for “hot sauces” and download a spreadsheet of all recipe costs to look for ways to minimize expenses.

4. Downloading Labels

Outside of the new options, there is still the ability to bulk download labels. From the download section of the label page, there’s a link to “Save multiple labels”. Once you click on that, the Recipe Management page now gives you all the bulk update options discussed above plus the ability to download PDF or PNG files of your labels. You can select the format and page size for your download and use filters to hone in on just the labels you want to download.

Scaling With You

This feature came from interviews with super-users who expressed a desire for bulk editing to help manage their large collection of recipes. If your business doesn’t yet have an overwhelming amount of data that doesn’t mean you won’t be there some day. At ReciPal, we’re building software that will scale with your business. Our roadmap is based on listening to our customers and delivering value. So whether you have 5 recipes or 5000, feel free to let us know what would make your life easier.