When you first start using FoodWorks 10 Nutrition Labelling to create your products’ recipes, you might reasonably think – Where do I find ingredients? Shouldn’t there be a list of ingredients included in FoodWorks for me to select from?

For example, here I am about to create a recipe called ‘Hummus Dip’. I want to enter the ingredient, cumin powder. But as I type the first few letters of cumin in the Search box, I don’t see a list of foods coming up for me to choose from – which is not what a new user might expect!

So where are the ingredients?

Behind the scenes, FoodWorks does include nutrient information for many foods: FoodWorks comes with a range of data sources for Australia and New Zealand, containing thousands of foods and their nutrient composition data. Examples of these data sources are the Australian Food Composition Database from FSANZ and the NZ FOODFiles. However, with FoodWorks Nutrition Labelling, as it comes out-of-the-box, you will not see these food lists when you enter ingredients into a recipe.

So, why don’t you see lists of ingredients to choose from straight up? It’s because we recommend that for each of your ingredients, in FoodWorks you create a raw material. FoodWorks Nutrition Labelling is configured by default to support this recommendation.

Recommendation: If you are creating ingredients for the purposes of product labelling, for each of your ingredients, create a raw material in FoodWorks. Then when you create your recipes (or sub-recipes), you choose their ingredients from your own raw materials.

This may seem labour-intensive – and yes, there is set-up time –  but this approach gives you a lot of power and control over your ingredient data and over the information that FoodWorks generates for your labels.

To derive the nutrient composition values for each of your raw materials, you can either use the supplier’s product spec sheet or you can map the raw material to a food available in the data sources. But a raw material in FoodWorks contains much more information than just nutrient composition values. A raw material also contains:

• Allergen data
• Attributes for calculating Health Star Ratings
• Attributes for calculating Country of Origin
• And more – such as the type of raw material it is, its label declaration name etc

About raw materials in FoodWorks

So let’s have a look at a raw material in FoodWorks.

To create a new raw material, on the FoodWorks toolbar, click New and choose Raw Material.

On the General tab

Have a look on the General tab. Here you get to set:

• The type of raw material, which affects the data you need to enter and what is displayed on product labels:
  
• The name to show for the raw material on product labels (its ‘declaration’ name):
  

(For detailed help on entering information into this tab, see More Help below.)

On the Nutrients & Components tab – Setting nutrient values

Then click on the Nutrients & Components tab. This is where the FoodWorks data source foods can show up.

On this tab you set the nutrient values for the raw material (as well as other data such as whether allergens are present or not, and attributes for calculating Health Star Ratings and Country of Origin percentages).

To set the nutrient values for a raw material you have two options:

OPTION 1 – Use the supplier product specs

Recommendation: If you have a product specification for the ingredient, generally you should enter the nutrient values it provides.

Here’s how to enter nutrient values from a product specification:

1. Set the Base analysis on drop-down to Unknown for all nutrients.
2. Type the values for the ingredient provided in the spec into the Value column.
   

OPTION 2 – Map to a food in the data sources

Recommendation: If you have a generic ingredient for which you do not have a product specification, such as ‘cumin powder’ or ‘brown onion’,  map it to a food from a data source.

Here’s how to base the nutrient analysis for a raw material on a food from a data source:

1. Set the Base analysis on drop-down to Other item (or simply click the ellipsis button…)
2. Then type in a few letters of the name of the food. Now (at last!) you get to see a list of foods from data sources included with FoodWorks. (See screenshot below.)
3. Select the best match.
   
4. This populates the nutrient data for the raw material (in the Default column) with values from the mapped data source food. You can then alter or add to the nutrient data, if required, by entering values in the Override column.

On the Nutrients & Components tab – Setting other information

Here you can also enter other important data for the raw material, including:

• Data for calculating Country of Origin percentages
• Data for calculating Health Star Ratings
• Allergens present in the raw material
  

For more on how to enter this information see More Help below.

A bit of general advice

When you are entering a raw material into FoodWorks, work through its tabs from left to right, and through each of its tabs from top to bottom:

That way you’ll have entered all the information you need.

And click the Save button.

The upshot…

The information you enter for your raw materials – your ingredients – flows through to your product labels, making your labels more controlled and more accurate.

More help

If you want more detailed information about how to set up your raw materials, here’s extra help:

• Sample database
  For examples of raw materials in use in a FoodWorks database, see the sample database provided with FoodWorks – In FoodWorks, on the Help menu, click Open Sample Database, then Open Sample NL Database.

• Introductory guides (PDF)
  Introductory guide for FoodWorks Nutrition Labelling
  Getting started with Health Star Ratings
  Getting started with CoOL