Adding & fixing recipes

The Helping Friendly Book · for whoever is cleaning up the sheets

No code, no deploy

Every prep and cook sheet in the book can be edited here, by you, and the change is live the moment you save it — on the tablets, on the prep sheets, and in the cook guide the floor opens at the kettle. There is nothing to install and nobody to wait for.

Nothing you do here is permanent. Every save keeps the version it replaced, and the very first edit stores the recipe exactly as the book shipped it. 🕰 History will always put any of it back.

Two different jobs

Fixing a sheet that already exists — a weight is wrong, a note is out of date, an ingredient changed. Open the sheet and press ✎ edit, or pick it from the list in the editor.
Writing a sheet that does not exist yet — the eleven SKUs with no recipe in the book. That is ＋ Start a new recipe, and it needs one extra step at the end (linking the SKU) that fixing an existing sheet does not.

Writing a new recipe

Open the editor and press ＋ Start a new recipe At the foot of the cookbook menu, under Look after the book, the ✎ Edit a recipe tile. The new-recipe button is at the end of the list of recipes.

It asks three things

It asks	What to put
What is the soup called?	The name as people say it — “Walmart Cheddar Broccoli”.
Recipe code	The short code, written the way the workbooks write it: WM CHZ, CO LPS. This is the important one — see the note below.
Web address	Lowercase with dashes, e.g. wm-chz. It suggests one; the suggestion is usually right.

Fill in the prep rows The 🥣 Prep tab. One row per thing somebody portions. It starts empty — that is the actual work, and there is a note on screen saying so.
Fill in the cook steps The 🔥 Cook tab. One list per kettle group (usually A-B and C-F), because those kettles are run differently.
Save Save at the bottom of the screen. The note box beside it is optional and shows up in the history — “corrected onion weight” saves somebody a guess in three months.
Link the SKU — this is the step people forget 🔒 Admin → Cook instructions — link each SKU to its recipe. Find the SKU, point it at your new recipe code. (That link opens the 📋 Reference data tab straight at it.)
Until the SKU is linked, the floor gets nothing. No cook guide, no container checklist, and no message on screen explaining why — just a bare timer. The recipe is fine; it is the join that is missing.

The prep tab, column by column

Column	What it means
Step	When it goes into the kettle during the cook — not the order it gets portioned in. It has to match a step number that exists on the Cook tab, or the sheet will refuse to save and tell you which row is wrong.
Part #	The Fishbowl part number. This is what the prep clerk cross-checks, so get it exact.
Food item	English and Spanish. Fill in both — the floor reads whichever the tablet is set to, and a blank Spanish box shows the English, which slowly stops matching.
Amount	Pounds for one kettle. The sheet multiplies it out for the run itself.
Cont.	How many containers this item is split into.
Per container	The weight in each one. If they are not all the same, write them separated by & — 95 & 90 for two containers. The count of weights has to match the container count.
Allergen	MILK, and so on. Leave blank if none.
Notes	The instruction that goes with the item — “PEELED & LARGE DICE”. Also where combine into 1 lives, for items that get blended into a single container.

The other tabs

🔥 Cook

Each kettle group has its own list of steps: step number, temperature and valve, minutes, what goes in, and what to do. Three checkboxes sit on each step — CCP, CQP, and Not approved yet.

Tick CCP on the step where the temperature is taken. That is what makes the floor ask for CCP1 at all. If no step is ticked, the app never asks — and nobody notices until an audit. Set the target temperature on 📋 The card as well.

📋 The card

Name, code, batch size, allergens, expected yield, total containers, and the CCP1 target. Also the version line and the sign-off.

Leaving “Approved by” blank is what puts the striped DRAFT banner on the sheet. That banner is the honest state of most of these recipes. Don’t fill the name in to make it go away — fill it in when somebody has actually approved it.

📝 Extras

Step headings (“Butter · Onion · Bacon”), the callout boxes at the foot of the sheet, the water table, and internal notes. Internal notes are not shown on the floor — they are for recording why something is the way it is.

🕰 History

Every version, who saved it and when. Put this version back restores one. Reset to the shipped version throws away every edit and goes back to how the recipe came with the app. Both are themselves saved, so both can be undone.

Two things that will bite you

1 · Adding, deleting or moving a prep row while that recipe is cooking.
The cook ticks off containers against the row numbers on this sheet. Change how many rows there are, or their order, and every tick already made slides onto the wrong ingredient — and Finish Cook can unlock before everything is actually in the kettle.

The editor will stop and tell you exactly how many kettles are cooking and how many containers are already ticked. Read it. If a kettle is running, wait for it unless the sheet is wrong in a way that cannot wait. Changing a weight, a note or a part number is always safe — it only asks about adding, deleting or moving rows.

2 · “Someone else saved this recipe at …”
Two of you had the same sheet open. Reload the page and make your change again. Annoying, but the alternative is your colleague’s afternoon quietly disappearing. Nothing is lost — their version is on screen after the reload, and yours is still in your head.

When it refuses to save

A red box appears and the Save button greys out. It is not being fussy — every one of these means the sheet would break something on the floor:

What it says	What to do
…is for step 7, which no cook group has	A prep row points at a cook step that doesn’t exist. Either fix the step number on the row, or add that step on the Cook tab. Left alone, those containers never appear on the cook’s checklist and Finish Cook waits forever.
3 weights for 2 containers	The 95 & 90 list doesn’t match the container count. Fix one or the other.
has no item name	An empty row. Fill it in or delete it.
cook group A-B has no steps	You emptied a kettle group. Those kettles would get no guide at all — add a step back, or remove the whole group.
has no step number	A cook step needs its number. Without it the checklist has nowhere to draw its containers.
containers must be a number	Something non-numeric got into a number box.

The row numbers in these messages match the small grey numbers down the left of the prep table, so you can go straight to the row it means.

Good to know

It saves to the plant laptop, so the editor only works on the plant network or over the VPN. Reading the sheets works from anywhere.
Your name is on every save. The editor shows who it thinks you are at the top; if it says you are not signed in, it will let you look but not save.
The 👁 View this sheet button opens the real prep sheet in a new tab, so you can check a change the way the floor will see it.
A brand-new recipe says “written here” on its badge and NEW on the cookbook menu. That is deliberate — a sheet nobody has cooked from yet deserves a second pair of eyes.
Deleting only exists for recipes written here, needs the supervisor PIN, and refuses while an open batch is still using the recipe. Recipes that came with the app are put back with Reset instead.

Still stuck?

Ask Phil. If the editor refuses something and the message doesn’t make sense, send him the exact wording of the red box — it names the row it is unhappy about.

✎ Open the editor ← Back to the cookbook

Bolder Foods Helping Friendly Book · The Honest Stand