Ingredients

Info about Ingredients

Ingredients are the building blocks of made products. In a similar way they are one of the main building blocks of the functionality within the NPDtech suite of products. Extra functionality is available as you add further modules to your system.

At its core an Ingredient is an item available for use in a recipe that has associated risks in its use. Bought Ingredients have the additional information concerning each supplier or potential supplier, including the ability to track conversations about commercial negotiations. If the recipe and nutrition modules are enabled then you are also able to log details about allergens and nutritional values (including auto-populating from McCance).

Ingredients Tile

The ingredients tile provides quick access to your raw materials. It has handy reports to highlight those Ingredients awaiting approval or undergoing a risk assessment. Also provided is a list of recent Food Alerts from food.gov.uk along with a facility to log any necessary follow-up and the ability to alert your colleagues. If the Recipe and Nutrition modules are enabled then there are also reports for Ingredients in use and a list of the products they are used in along with a roll-up on Country of Origin.

Definition of “Roll-up” - all the constituent parts are collected together, merged and any potential duplicates removed. Examples include collating a list of all the Country of Origins of all the ingredients used in a recipe.

Suppliers

More information about an Ingredient’s Suppliers can be found here

Inherent Food Safety Risks

Inherent food safety risks are found naturally in the food and can generally be found in “types” of ingredients. The system has functionality allowing you to keep a catalogue of these inherent risks and have them assigned automatically to your ingredients based on type.

Risk Assessment

Facilities allow you to store your Ingredient Risk Assessment. The system will ask you to log your risk score and rating along side any documents that act as evidence. There is a confirmation and verification system to help prove compliance. Depending on the risk rating a suggested Next Review Date will be set.

Samples In

An ability to log your requests for and receipt of samples from your suppliers is available within the Supplier Approval product. You are able to upload any associated documentation, however it is recommended that the Ingredient Specification Document is stored against the appropriate Ingredient Supplier record

Spec (Ingredients)

If you have access to the Spec Generation functionality then Ingredients will have an additional Tab providing access to Spec information.

This is a subset of the Spec info of a Product and allows you to set the Allergens and Nutrition information for the ingredient that are used in Roll-Ups (calculating product level spec information from the ingredients and proportions in the recipe).

In ingredient specifications, there are two important fields to consider - Ingredient Public Name and Ingredient Declaration.

Ingredient Public Name

This field allows you to manually enter the ingredient name that you use appear in ingredient declarations for recipes, where it is different to the internal ingredient name you use.

For example,

internal name = garlic granules ingredient public name = garlic

or

internal name = soured cream ingredient public name = soured cream (contains milk)

An ingredient declaration for a product using the examples could be

soured cream (contains milk), garlic, chives, salt

Ingredient Declaration

Use this field if an ingredient has multiple components. For example

Ingredient public name: Roasted red pepper Ingredient declaration: Red Peppers, Water, Salt, Red Wine Vinegar, Sugar

These will show inside square brackets in the ingredient declarations of products that use it. The ingredient declaration for a recipe containing those peppers could be

Cream, Roasted red pepper [Red Peppers, Water, Salt, Red Wine Vinegar, Sugar], Pine Nuts

For more detailed information about Specs click here