Take your recipes out as a file — the workbook layout your plant already reads, or the machine format that carries a recipe whole.
Real help from real food people
Chef Diego runs a real food plant. If this page didn't get you there, tell us — a person reads every message.
A recipe you can only read on a screen is a recipe stuck in one building. Your co-packer wants the sheet in the layout they already work from, the second plant needs the whole thing including the versions nobody signed off yet, and the consultant writing your labels wants a file their own system can read. Export recipes takes the file out, from Export between Import and New at the top of Recipes.
Kitchen+Narrow the list first, if you want to
Export carries whatever the Recipes list is showing. Filter to one department, or to sub-recipes only, then select Export — the screen opens saying how many of your recipes the list narrowed to, and these are them. Change what the list shows goes back to the list with your filters intact.
Pick the recipes
Everything the list showed arrives picked, and the box at the top counts them — 12 of 12 picked. Untick what you don't want, or clear the lot with that box and take back only the two you came for. One file carries 200 recipes; a longer list says so and takes the first 200, so narrow the list or take the rest in a second file.
Pick the shape
Which shape lists every layout your company has saved under a name at the import door, then The machine format (.json). Which one to pick is the next section.
Select Export
The file downloads. The page stays where it is, so you can change the selection and take a second file without walking back.
A saved layout is the reading you kept when you first brought that workbook in — the tabs, the columns, the labels your plant writes its yields beside. Exporting through one writes your recipes back into that shape, so what comes out is a workbook the people who wrote the original will recognize. Each recipe arrives at the version your plant reads now: the newest one your plant approved, or the newest draft where nothing is approved yet.
The machine format is the other errand. It carries a recipe whole — every
version at the number your plant gave it, every step in every language your
floor reads, the storage and handling and shelf-life facts, the control points
and quality checks, and the notes typed against each version. It is a .json
file, so a spreadsheet won't open it. It exists so a recipe can cross into
another company without a person retyping it.
No saved layouts yet?
Then the machine format is your only shape, and Which shape says so. A layout comes from Import recipes: map a workbook once, fill in Save this mapping as, and select Save setup. Export hands that same layout back.
Everything a person typed travels. Two things deliberately do not:
The file you take out is a file the import door reads. Export ten recipes through your saved layout, drop that same workbook on Import recipes, and read it through the same layout. The check counts one box — 10 already yours, Unchanged — nothing to take in — and Land as drafts is switched off beside There is nothing in this file for your company to take in. The same holds for the machine format.
That round trip is worth doing once, deliberately, before you send anything to anybody: it proves the layout you picked carries every part of your recipes, in your own company, where a mistake costs nothing. If a recipe comes back Differs from yours, the layout has no column for whatever changed — a step's temperature, say, or a second language — and the far side would have received a recipe missing it too.
A saved layout only reads the tabs it was taught. Ask it to carry a recipe it has never seen and the export stops rather than writing a file that cannot be read back: The "Plant workbook" layout reads recipes only from the tabs it was taught, and it has none for Coconut Curry Base. Export the machine format instead, or import these recipes through this layout once.
Both ways out of it are in the sentence. The machine format carries anything. Or bring that recipe in through the layout once, so the layout learns its tab, and the export has a shape for it afterwards.
A refusal clears the selection
Export recipes comes back with the message and everything picked again from the list. Re-tick what you wanted and take the file with the other shape.