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Recipes & Per-Dish Carbon

A recipe in ReRoute AI is a prepared item on your menu — a cocktail, a plated dish, a batch of sauce — defined by its ingredient list (its bill of materials). Recipes connect your menu to two things you already track: your inventory (what gets consumed when a dish sells) and your carbon number (the footprint attributed to each dish).

You'll find them under Recipes in the left sidebar.

Why recipes matter​

Without recipes, you track carbon and inventory at the product level — cases of tomatoes, bottles of gin. Recipes let you go one level finer: you can see the carbon footprint of a single dish and understand how selling that dish draws down your stock. That's what powers per-dish sustainability and accurate menu-driven inventory depletion.

How it works​

  1. Create the recipe. Add a recipe two ways:

    • In the web Recipes section — start from a blank form, or use Import from text or photo, where the AI drafts the ingredient list for you to review.
    • On the mobile app with Scan a Recipe — photograph a recipe card and let the AI extract the ingredients.

    Nothing is saved until you confirm — AI-extracted ingredients always go through your review first.

  2. Resolve the ingredients. Each ingredient line is matched to a known ingredient in the catalog. Anything the system can't match automatically goes to a short review queue for you to resolve by hand.

  3. Activate it. Activation locks in the recipe and calculates its full ingredient breakdown — converting each ingredient's units into mass and accounting for prep yield (as-purchased vs. edible). A recipe can only be activated once every ingredient is resolved.

  4. Sell it. When a dish sells — through a connected POS or an uploaded sales file — ReRoute AI records that sale and the dish's carbon footprint.

  5. Deplete inventory. At the end of each period, the platform totals what sold, maps each ingredient back to the products you stock, and records the corresponding stock out movements automatically.

Key things to understand​

  • Per-dish carbon is an attribution, not extra emissions. A product's carbon is counted once, when you receive it (as purchased goods). The per-dish footprint simply distributes that already-counted carbon across the dishes that use it — so your totals never double-count.
  • A recipe does nothing until it's activated. Its ingredient breakdown, per-dish carbon, and inventory depletion are all empty until every ingredient is resolved and you activate it.
  • Recipes are versioned. If you change an ingredient list and re-activate, that creates a new version. Past sales keep the version that was active when they happened, so history stays accurate.
  • Per-dish footprints carry a confidence level. Depending on how well each ingredient maps to carbon data, a dish's footprint is rated High, Medium, or Low confidence — so you know how much to trust it.