The path from an approved recipe to a finished, traceable batch — how plans, schedules, runs, and cooking-and-cooling logs fit together on your floor.
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It's the start of a shift and today's run lists three recipes. Each one is
already broken into batches, and the first operator is weighing rice against a
target the recipe set weeks ago — not a number scribbled on a batch sheet that
morning. By the time those cases hit the cooler, the run has quietly captured
who weighed what, the cooking and cooling temperatures, and how much came out.
That whole chain is what production in Bettr is, and this page explains how the
pieces connect. Open Recipes
next to it and you'll meet the pieces in the order they come up.
Production lives behind the Production module, on the Kitchen plan and up. It
takes what you sell and what you know how to make, and turns it into dated work
on the floor with a record behind every batch.
Recipes are the master, and they're versioned
Everything starts with the recipe. A recipe holds the ingredients, the steps,
the equipment, the yield, and the food-safety settings for one thing you make.
Some are ; the rest are final recipes that produce a finished product.
A recipe isn't a single document you edit in place. It carries versions, and a
version moves through states: it starts a draft, goes up for approval, and comes
back approved or rejected. One approved version is marked the
. That's the copy a run actually uses. You can keep
editing in a child copy — an R&D version — while the floor keeps running the
approved one, then approve the new version and set it as production when it's
ready.
The floor runs the production version, not a draft
A run pulls the recipe's production version. An unapproved edit or a draft
child recipe never reaches the floor, so a change in the test kitchen can't
quietly rewrite the targets an operator is weighing to.
Plans decide what to make
A recipe is how to make something; a plan is what to make and how much. A
comes from one of two places. A sales-order plan is pulled from open order lines
— the demand waiting on Production needs — so you make exactly what a
customer bought. A recipe plan is make-to-stock: you pick a recipe and a
quantity because you want it on the shelf.
Either way the plan names a recipe and a quantity, and moves from pending into
production as the floor works it. A plan is still a spreadsheet-shaped intention,
though — it doesn't put anyone to work on its own. For that, it has to land on a
day.
The schedule puts plans on the calendar
Scheduling a plan spreads its quantity across the days you'll actually make it.
Each scheduled recipe on a given day is a line you can sequence, and the
Schedule list shows those days in the order the floor will work them. The
Master calendar sits above it, showing demand against the shift hours you
have, so you can see a day that's overloaded before you promise it.
The schedule is the hand-off from planning to the floor. A production run is
built from the recipes scheduled for a day — so the schedule is what a run reads
when it opens.
A run is your floor for the day
A is where planning becomes
sweat. You open a run for a date, and each scheduled recipe becomes a line item
on it. The run moves from pending to ongoing to completed as its line items get
worked and finished.
A run opens with tabs across the top — Recipes, Output records, and,
when the recipe calls for them, Cooking Log and Cooling Log — plus
Staff attendance for the supervisor. It also has two faces, toggled between
Operator and Supervisor. The Operator view is stripped down for the
person at the station: the recipes to weigh, filtered to what still needs
inputs or output. The Supervisor view adds the oversight — staff attendance,
confirming batches — for whoever is running the line. Same run, two jobs.
Batches and weighing
A run doesn't make a recipe in one lump; it makes it in batches. A
, and the count is simply the scheduled quantity divided by the
recipe's yield, rounded up. Each batch gets its own targets, so the record stays
batch-by-batch instead of blurring into one daily total.
How the weighing works depends on the recipe's input format:
Weigh every batch — the operator weighs each ingredient for every batch,
against a per-batch target. Bettr holds each weight to an input tolerance (1%
by default), so an underweigh or an overweigh shows up instead of passing
silently.
Weigh once per run — the ingredients are weighed a single time for the
whole run rather than batch by batch, for recipes that run as one continuous
make.
A line item's status follows the work: pending until someone starts it, in
progress while inputs and output are owed, finished when the batch is done. A
mistaken weigh isn't erased — you reverse it, and both the weigh and the
reversal stay on the record.
Output, WIP, and finished stock
When a batch is made, the operator records its output — either by weighing it or
by counting it in packaging groups plus loose units. The Output records tab reads
each batch as target, recorded, and remaining, so you can see at a glance what's
been produced against what was scheduled.
Recording output turns the batch into a lot. That lot shows up in
, sorted into raw material, sub-recipes, and final
recipes so you always know what's staged in the kitchen. A produced lot carries
its own lot number and expiry from the moment it's made — so a final-recipe batch
counts as finished inventory and traces forward and backward exactly like a lot
you received at the dock, while a sub-recipe lot waits in the kitchen to feed the
recipes that use it.
Cooking and cooling logs are your critical control points
Food safety isn't a separate binder here; it rides on the run. When a recipe
turns on its cooking or cooling log, the matching tab appears on every run of
that recipe, and the batch can't be called done until the log is complete.
A is captured per batch. The cooking log
takes three internal temperatures and the time, checked against the recipe's
minimum cooking temperature; a reading below it flags the batch as a Red
Alert instead of Ok. The cooling log records the starting temperature and
readings at two and five hours, against the cooling limits. Each recipe declares
whether it follows FDA or USDA rules, and the log is scored to that authority.
A red alert is a record, not a roadblock you delete
When a temperature comes in out of limit, the batch reads Red Alert and stays
that way in the record. The point isn't to hide it — it's to catch the failure
on the batch it happened to, so you can act on that batch and show, later,
exactly what you did.
The batch record is the audit trail
Add it all up — the production version that ran, every ingredient weighing and
its reversals, the cooking and cooling temperatures, the output, and who was on
the line — and each batch carries a
. Nothing in it is typed over; corrections are
their own entries, so the before and after both survive.
That's why an audit or a mock recall stops being a scramble. The run exports its
cooking and cooling logs as FDA and USDA templates — CCP-1B for cooking, CCP-2B
for cooling — ready before the auditor reaches the door. And because a finished
batch traces forward to every shipment and back to the lots that fed it, the
batch record is the spine of your traceability, not a form you fill in after the
fact.