Bakery Software FAQ: 10 Questions About Recipe Costing, Labels and Allergen Tracking

Q1: What is the best bakery software for small bakeries?

The best software depends on what you most need. Here's how to think about it by stage of business:

• Starting out (home baker, cake shed, market stall): Need recipe storage, allergen tracking and Natasha's Law labels. FoodCore Essentials (£19/month) covers all three.
• Growing (regular production, multiple products, staff): Add recipe costing, shopping lists, stock management. FoodCore Core (£55/month) covers all of this plus food safety logs.
• Larger bakery/café: May also need a POS system (Square, Lightspeed), accounting software (Xero, QuickBooks) and staff scheduling (Deputy).

Q2: How do bakeries calculate recipe costs?

Recipe costing works by breaking every recipe down to a cost per ingredient, then summing those costs to find the total recipe cost and dividing by the number of portions. Here's the exact method:

1. List every ingredient in the recipe with its quantity (in grams or ml)
2. Calculate the cost per gram or ml from your supplier prices
3. Multiply the quantity used by the cost per gram for each ingredient
4. Sum all the ingredient costs to get the total recipe cost
5. Divide the total recipe cost by the number of portions to get cost per unit

Worked example — batch of 12 brownies:

FoodCore does all of this automatically — enter your ingredients and quantities once, and the cost per unit is calculated for you. Change a supplier price and every recipe that uses that ingredient updates instantly. See our recipe costing software for bakeries page or our complete recipe costing guide for more detail.

Q3: How do I price cakes properly?

The most common mistake bakeries make is pricing based only on ingredient costs. That almost always results in underpricing. Real pricing for a sustainable bakery must cover four things:

1. Food cost — ingredients plus packaging
2. Labour — your time, at a fair hourly rate (minimum £12–£15/hour)
3. Overhead — power, equipment depreciation, rent or household cost contribution, insurance
4. Profit margin — what's left after all of the above

Worked example using the brownie above: The brownie costs £0.58 in ingredients. At a 30% food cost target:

Minimum selling price = £0.58 ÷ 0.30 = £1.93

But that doesn't include labour. If it takes 2 hours to make 12 brownies at £12/hour, that's £24 in labour ÷ 12 = £2.00 per brownie. The real minimum price including labour is £0.58 + £2.00 = £2.58 — before overhead and profit. Selling at £2 means you're actively losing money on every brownie.

For more on this, see our guides on the most profitable bakery items and the 30-30-30 rule for food businesses.

Q4: How do I create allergen labels for baked goods?

Under Natasha's Law, any food that is pre-packed for direct sale (PPDS) must carry a label with the full name of the food and a full ingredients list, with the 14 major allergens emphasised — typically in bold — whenever they appear.

To create a compliant label you need:

• A full ingredients list, written in descending order of weight (the ingredient that weighs the most goes first)
• Every allergen from the 14 major allergens list highlighted in bold wherever it appears
• The name of the food on the label

You can do this manually in Word or Canva — but it is error-prone and time-consuming, particularly when you have many products or change recipes frequently. FoodCore generates the label automatically from your recipe data: it identifies which of the 14 allergens are present, orders ingredients by weight, formats allergens in bold, and outputs a print-ready label. See our Natasha's Law labelling software page and our guide on how to create allergen labels for a UK bakery.

Q5: Can I make Natasha's Law labels from recipes?

Yes — and this is exactly what FoodCore is designed to do. You enter your recipe (ingredients, weights) and FoodCore generates a Natasha's Law compliant PPDS label automatically.

The workflow in FoodCore is:

1. Add your ingredients to FoodCore, noting the allergen information for each
2. Build your recipe with ingredients and quantities
3. FoodCore builds the ingredient list in descending weight order automatically
4. Allergens are automatically identified and formatted in bold
5. You print the label directly or save it as a PDF

The critical advantage over manual label creation: when you change a recipe — swap an ingredient, change a quantity, substitute a brand — the label updates automatically. There is no risk of printing outdated labels with incorrect allergen information. For full details, see our Natasha's Law labelling software page.

Q6: How do I track allergens in bakery ingredients?

Allergen tracking in a bakery is more complex than it first appears. Allergens can hide in unexpected places:

• Milk in some margarines and dairy-free spreads (check the label)
• Sesame in some mixed spice blends and za'atar-style seasonings
• Sulphites in dried fruits, including raisins and apricots
• Gluten in some brands of baking powder (made with wheat starch rather than maize)
• Nuts in marzipan, some flavourings and certain chocolate products

Tracking allergens properly requires: reviewing every ingredient's allergen declaration from the supplier, checking "may contain" precautionary statements, flagging when you change suppliers (a different brand of the same ingredient may have different allergen information), and keeping an ingredient database that's updated when products change.

FoodCore's ingredient database tracks allergens per ingredient. When you add an ingredient and note it contains milk, every recipe using that ingredient is automatically flagged as containing milk. See our allergen matrix software page and our guide to allergen management for food businesses.

Q7: Can I create shopping lists from recipes?

Yes — and this is one of the most practical time-savers for bakeries running regular production. Rather than manually calculating how much of each ingredient you need for a week's baking schedule, dedicated software can generate a shopping list from your planned recipes automatically.

In FoodCore Core, the process is:

1. Input how many units of each product you're making this week
2. FoodCore scales each recipe to the required batch size
3. Ingredient quantities are totalled across all recipes
4. A shopping list is produced, sorted by supplier

This eliminates the mental arithmetic of batch scaling across multiple recipes and ensures you order exactly what you need — reducing both over-ordering and running out mid-production. See our page on batch recipe shopping lists for more.

Q8: How do I manage ingredient price changes?

This is where spreadsheets break down badly — and where purpose-built software earns its keep.

When a supplier puts up the price of butter by 20%, in a spreadsheet you'd need to find every recipe that contains butter and update the price in each one manually. Miss one recipe, and your costing data is wrong. With 30 products all using butter, that's 30 individual updates — and a high chance of error.

In FoodCore Core, you update the price of butter once — in the ingredient record — and every recipe that uses butter recalculates automatically. You can see at a glance:

• Which products have had their margins affected by the price change
• By how much the food cost % has moved on each product
• Whether you need to adjust your selling prices to maintain your target margin

This is a FoodCore Core plan feature. See our recipe costing software for bakeries page.

Q9: Is Excel enough for a bakery business?

For a very small operation with 5–10 recipes and no regulatory labelling requirements, Excel can work as a starting point. But it has significant limitations that become painful quickly:

• No allergen tracking — you'd need to maintain a separate allergen matrix and keep it synchronised with your recipes manually
• No automatic label generation — Natasha's Law compliant labels cannot be generated from Excel
• No automatic price cascade — change a supplier price and you must update every affected recipe by hand
• No food safety logs — temperature checks, cleaning records and HACCP documentation need separate systems
• Formula fragility — Excel formulas break when cells are copied, rows are inserted, or someone opens the wrong version
• Version control issues — when multiple people or devices are involved, it's easy to end up with conflicting versions

Most bakeries outgrow Excel within their first year of trading. The typical breaking point is allergen management — keeping a manually maintained allergen matrix in Excel while also managing labels, prices and shopping lists becomes untenable quickly. FoodCore was built for exactly this transition. See our post on what software chefs and food businesses actually use.

Q10: What software do small food businesses use for labels?

Here are the main options available to small UK food businesses for allergen labelling:

1. FoodCore — purpose-built for UK food businesses. Generates Natasha's Law compliant PPDS labels directly from your recipe data. Includes automatic allergen tracking, recipe costing, shopping lists and food safety logs. From £19/month.
2. Word / Canva — free, but entirely manual. No automatic allergen detection — you must identify and bold allergens yourself. High risk of error, especially as your product range grows or recipes change.
3. Kafoodle — enterprise-focused allergen and menu management platform. Capable, but expensive and over-specified for small bakeries and home food businesses.
4. Jelly — simpler recipe management platform with some allergen features. Limited labelling capabilities compared to dedicated PPDS label software.
5. Generic label design software (Avery, Labelmaker) — handles the design and printing side of labels but contains no allergen compliance logic. You still need to identify and format allergens manually.

The key feature to look for is whether the software automatically identifies allergens from your recipe data and formats them correctly for PPDS labels — that is what eliminates human error. See our dedicated pages on allergen label software for UK food businesses and our overview of what recipe management software actually does.