Getting Started with FoodCore: Your 7-Day Free Trial Guide
You have signed up for your FoodCore 7-day free trial — or you are about to. This guide tells you exactly what to do each day of your trial to get the most from it: starting with the ingredient database that underpins everything else, through recipe costing, allergen profiles and PPDS labels, to a pricing review on day six and a final decision on day seven. By the end of your trial, you should know your true cost and gross margin on every product you sell. That information alone is worth more than the cost of a month's subscription.
What FoodCore is — and what it is for
FoodCore is kitchen management software built for small UK food businesses. The businesses it is designed for are varied but share common challenges: home bakers selling to local customers and at markets, bakeries with 1–5 staff managing multiple product lines, caterers providing allergen declarations to event clients, market stall traders needing PPDS labels, and small food manufacturers providing allergen matrices to wholesale buyers. What unites these businesses is that they are too large and complex to manage comfortably with a spreadsheet, but too small to justify an enterprise compliance platform built for major food manufacturers or national hospitality chains.
FoodCore covers five core areas. First, recipe costing: the software calculates the ingredient cost per recipe and per portion automatically, drawing from an ingredient database you populate with your actual purchase prices. When ingredient prices change — which they do, regularly — updating the ingredient record updates the cost of every recipe that uses it. Second, allergen management: FoodCore tracks all 14 UK allergens at the ingredient level, and that data propagates automatically through every recipe and nested sub-recipe. You do not manually specify allergens at the recipe level — you specify them once at the ingredient level, and FoodCore handles the rest. Third, Natasha's Law PPDS label generation: FoodCore generates a print-ready label with the product name, a full ingredients list in descending order by weight, and all 14 allergens highlighted in bold within that list — exactly as Natasha's Law requires. When a recipe changes, the label updates. There is no separate label file to maintain or risk falling out of date. Fourth, allergen matrix export: on the Core plan, FoodCore generates a matrix showing all 14 allergens across your entire product range — the document wholesale buyers, market organisers and Environmental Health Officers will ask to see. Fifth, order tracking: also on the Core plan, you can link customer orders to recipes and track production requirements within the same system.
What FoodCore is not is equally important to understand. It is not an accounting package — it does not handle invoicing, VAT, payroll or tax returns. It is not a point-of-sale system — it does not process customer payments or manage customer-facing orders in a retail or hospitality setting. And it is not an ecommerce platform — it does not run an online shop, manage a customer database or process delivery logistics. FoodCore sits in the kitchen, not in the customer-facing or financial layers of the business. The primary question it answers is: what does this recipe cost me to make, what allergens does it contain, and what label does it need?
Who benefits most from FoodCore
Home bakers and cake businesses benefit from FoodCore in two closely connected ways. The first is knowing the true cost per recipe. Most home bakers who have not used recipe costing software are pricing by intuition — an estimate of ingredient costs plus a margin that feels right. In practice, that estimate is almost always wrong, and usually wrong in the direction of underpricing. Flour, butter, eggs, flavourings, packaging — the full ingredient cost of a complex bake, costed accurately against actual purchase prices, is routinely 20–40% higher than an informal estimate. FoodCore surfaces the real number. The second benefit is allergen compliance. Natasha's Law applies to the vast majority of home bakers selling PPDS food, and the manual alternatives — a Word document label, a Canva template, a handwritten list — carry real risk of error and give no audit trail. FoodCore provides the compliance infrastructure that Natasha's Law requires, without complexity. See FoodCore home bakery software for more on how the product works for this use case.
Bakeries with multiple product lines face a specific challenge that grows with product range size: keeping cost, allergen and label data current across tens or hundreds of products when ingredients change. A supplier reformulates a product and adds sesame. A new flour blend replaces the old one. The cost of butter rises 12% quarter on quarter. In a spreadsheet, tracking these changes and propagating them to every affected recipe is a manual task that is easy to fall behind on. In FoodCore, updating a single ingredient record updates every recipe that uses it — costs, allergen profiles and labels all in one action. For bakeries managing 20, 50 or 100 products, this is the difference between allergen data that is always current and allergen data that is always slightly out of date. See FoodCore bakery management software for the full feature breakdown.
Caterers benefit from a different primary use case: being able to provide accurate, documented allergen declarations to event clients immediately on request. A caterer who is asked "does the beef bourguignon contain celery?" should not have to consult handwritten notes or search a folder of Word documents. FoodCore gives caterers a centralised, searchable allergen record for every dish, with a full allergen matrix that can be shared with clients as a PDF. Caterers providing food at events with large numbers of guests — where a missed allergen declaration can have serious consequences — benefit most from the combination of accuracy, speed and documentation that FoodCore provides. For caterers building FoodCore into their workflow, the catering management software page explains the key features in a catering context.
How the 7-day free trial works
No card is required. Sign up at https://signup.foodcore.io/ and choose the plan you want to evaluate — Essentials at £19/month or Core at £55/month. You get full access to all features on your chosen plan for 7 days. The trial is not a restricted or watered-down version of FoodCore — it is the complete product. You can add ingredients, build recipes, generate labels, export your allergen matrix and explore every feature of the plan you selected. There are no artificial limits on the number of ingredients or recipes you can add during the trial.
If you decide to continue at the end of your trial, you add your payment details before day 7 and your subscription begins from that point. If you decide not to continue, you do nothing — your account expires after 7 days and no charge is made. There is no cancellation step required. This means the only action that results in a charge is actively adding payment details and choosing to continue. Inaction results in the trial ending, cleanly and without cost.
The 7-day period is designed to be sufficient to build out your core recipes, verify that FoodCore solves the problems you signed up to solve, and make an informed decision about whether a monthly subscription is worthwhile. The guide below tells you how to structure those 7 days. Most users find that by day 3 or 4, they have enough data in the system to see clearly whether FoodCore is the right tool for their business.
Start Your Free 7-Day Trial Now →Day 1 — Set up your ingredient database
The ingredient database is the foundation of everything in FoodCore. Without accurate ingredient data — including costs and allergen profiles — recipe costing and allergen tracking cannot work. This is not a step you can skip or approximate. The quality of every cost calculation and every allergen declaration you produce depends on the accuracy of the ingredient data underneath it. On day one, the goal is not to build a complete database — it is to build a database that covers your most-used ingredients accurately enough to start building recipes.
Focus on the 20–30 ingredients you use most frequently across your best-selling products. For each ingredient, you need five pieces of information: the ingredient name, the supplier or brand, the pack size (for example, 1 kg, 500 g, 1 litre, 12-pack), the pack price in pounds sterling — what you actually paid for that specific pack size from that specific supplier — and the unit the ingredient is measured in when you use it in recipes (grams, millilitres, or pieces). FoodCore calculates the cost per gram or millilitre automatically from the pack size and pack price. You do not need to calculate a cost per gram yourself — enter the pack data and the software does the arithmetic. You also set the allergen profile for each ingredient at this point: which of the 14 UK allergens it contains. This information comes from the supplier specification sheet or the product label. For most ingredients, it takes 30–60 seconds to enter each record.
A practical tip: gather your supplier receipts, invoices or order confirmations before you sit down to enter ingredients. Having the actual purchase prices in front of you is faster and more accurate than trying to recall them. For allergen data, pull up the product label on your phone or check the supplier's online product page — most major UK food wholesalers and retailers make full allergen information available online. If you use a product whose allergen data is unclear, contact the supplier directly and note the response. Do not guess allergen data. The accuracy of your allergen declarations depends entirely on the accuracy of your ingredient records.
Day 2 — Build your first recipe
Take your best-selling product and build it as a recipe in FoodCore. Add each ingredient from your database with the quantity used in the recipe — in grams, millilitres, or pieces, depending on how you measure that ingredient in practice. FoodCore calculates the total ingredient cost of the recipe and the cost per portion automatically, based on the ingredient costs you entered on day one. The calculation is immediate: as you add each ingredient and quantity, the running cost updates in real time.
Once your first recipe is built, check the maths against your own estimates. If the FoodCore cost per portion is significantly different from what you expected, that is important information. The discrepancy could mean your previous estimates were off — which is common, and why FoodCore is valuable — or it could mean there is a data entry error to find and correct. Work through the ingredients methodically: verify the pack size, pack price and quantity for each one. A common error is entering the pack price per unit instead of the pack price for the whole pack (for example, entering £0.20 for a single egg instead of £2.40 for a box of 12). Find the error, correct the ingredient record, and the recipe cost will update automatically.
Then scale the recipe. Try doubling it — FoodCore should double every ingredient quantity and the total cost, while keeping the cost per portion the same. This is a quick sanity check on the scaling logic. If the cost per portion changes when you scale, there is a calculation issue to investigate. Once the recipe passes this check, save it. On day two, aim to build two or three recipes in total. You will get faster as you go, because many ingredients appear across multiple recipes and are already in your database — each subsequent recipe requires fewer new ingredient entries.
Day 3 — Set up allergen profiles
FoodCore pulls allergen information from the ingredient records you set up on day one. On day three, the first task is to review the allergen data for each ingredient in your database and verify it is accurate. Cross-check against the product label or the supplier specification sheet. This verification step is important: allergen data entered in a rush, or carried over from memory rather than a specification sheet, is a source of error. Take the time to confirm each allergen profile against a primary source — the label or the spec sheet — before you rely on it in recipe declarations and labels.
For each recipe you have built, FoodCore shows you the allergen summary: which of the 14 allergens are present across all the ingredients in that recipe, calculated automatically from the ingredient-level data. Review this allergen summary for each recipe and verify it matches your own knowledge of the product. If a recipe shows an allergen you did not expect, trace it back: which ingredient is the source? Is that ingredient's allergen profile correct? If yes, the allergen declaration is accurate and important — you may have been unintentionally selling a product with an undeclared allergen. If the allergen is present in the ingredient data but should not be — for example, if the allergen profile was entered incorrectly — correct the ingredient record and the recipe allergen summary will update.
If you have products that are PPDS — packaged at your premises before the customer orders them — generate a Natasha's Law compliant label for one of those products today. FoodCore generates the label directly from the recipe data: the product name, the full ingredients list in descending order by weight, with all 14 allergens automatically bolded within the list. Check the ingredients list carefully: does it include everything in the recipe? Are the allergens correctly bolded? Is the format suitable for your label printer and label size? If there are format adjustments needed, work through them today — you want to be confident that your labels are production-ready before you reach day 7.
Day 4 — Add your remaining key recipes
Work through your top 10 products. Add each one as a recipe in FoodCore. By this point, your ingredient database has most of the ingredients you need — you will only need to add new ingredients for recipes that use materials not already in the database. Each new ingredient you add in this session makes subsequent recipes faster to build. By the time you reach recipe 8 or 9, you may find that every ingredient is already in the database and the recipe itself takes only a few minutes to build.
As you build each recipe, the cost per portion is calculated immediately. As you go, keep a note — or a simple column in a spreadsheet alongside FoodCore — of: product name, current selling price, FoodCore cost per portion, and gross margin percentage. Gross margin percentage is selling price minus ingredient cost, divided by selling price, expressed as a percentage. For a product selling at £4.00 with an ingredient cost of £1.20, the gross margin is (£4.00 - £1.20) / £4.00 = 70%. This number does not account for labour, packaging, overheads or platform fees — it is the pure ingredient margin. But it is the most important single number in your product economics, because you cannot make a profit if you cannot first make a positive ingredient margin.
By the end of day four, you will have a clear picture of which products are most and least profitable at the ingredient level. Some of these findings will confirm what you already suspected. Others may be surprising — a product you thought was your best margin may turn out to have a much higher ingredient cost than you estimated, because you had been mentally using an outdated price for a key ingredient. A product you were about to drop from the range may turn out to be more profitable than you realised. This is the core value of FoodCore: it makes the economics of your recipe range visible and accurate, instead of approximate and intuitive.
Day 5 — Generate your allergen matrix
FoodCore's allergen matrix shows all 14 UK allergens across every product in your recipe database — a grid of products against allergens, with each cell indicating whether the allergen is present as a direct ingredient or as a cross-contamination risk. The matrix is generated automatically from your recipe and ingredient data. You do not build the matrix manually; FoodCore builds it from the data you have already entered. On day five, generate the matrix and review it in full.
This is the document that wholesale buyers, food market organisers, event coordinators and Environmental Health Officers will ask for. Being able to share it instantly — as a PDF or spreadsheet export — is a professional differentiator from competitors who provide allergen information verbally or via a handwritten sheet. For businesses on the Core plan, the allergen matrix can be exported in a format suitable for sending to customers. For wholesale accounts in particular, an allergen matrix is often a requirement before a buyer will list your products.
Review the matrix carefully for any unexpected entries. If a product shows an allergen you did not expect to be present, trace it back through the ingredient records. Which ingredient is the source? Is that ingredient's allergen profile correctly set? If the allergen is present and correct, you need to update your allergen declarations for that product. If the allergen appears due to a data entry error in an ingredient record, correct the error and the matrix will update. Day five is also a good time to add any remaining products to the database that are not yet in FoodCore — even if you only build skeleton recipes with estimated costs, having every product in the system ensures the allergen matrix is complete.
Day 6 — Review your pricing
Using the gross margin figures FoodCore has calculated for each product, build a structured pricing review. For each product, the three numbers you need are: the ingredient cost per portion (from FoodCore), your current selling price, and the gross margin percentage. A healthy gross margin for a food product sold direct-to-consumer is typically 60–75% before labour, packaging and overhead. If you are consistently below 60% at the ingredient cost level alone, it is very difficult to achieve overall profitability once you account for your time and other costs.
Identify any products where your current selling price gives a gross margin below 50% at ingredient cost alone. These are the products where profitability is most at risk. A product with a 45% ingredient margin, priced at £3.50, has an ingredient cost of around £1.93. If packaging costs £0.30 and you spend 30 minutes making a batch of 6, your effective labour cost per unit is significant even at a modest hourly rate. The total cost per unit is likely to exceed the selling price. These products are not just low-margin — they may be loss-making once all costs are included. Pricing based on intuition tends to miss exactly these products, because the ingredient cost feels manageable until you cost it accurately.
For each product below your target margin, consider three options: raise the price, reformulate the recipe to reduce ingredient cost, or discontinue the product. Raising the price is often the most effective lever — customers are frequently less price-sensitive than food business owners assume, particularly for high-quality handmade products. Reformulating can be effective where a high-cost ingredient can be partially substituted without affecting the product quality significantly. Discontinuing products that cannot be made profitable frees up time and kitchen capacity for better-margin products. Identifying one underpriced product and raising its price — or removing a loss-making product from the range — can materially improve your business economics in the first month. Doing this across your full range, informed by FoodCore's accurate cost data, is one of the most financially impactful exercises you can run in any food business.
Day 7 — Decide and commit
At the end of day seven, you should have: your ingredient database built out for your top ingredients, your top 10 recipes costed with accurate gross margins, allergen profiles verified for every recipe, at least one PPDS label generated and checked, and an allergen matrix ready to export or share. The question to ask yourself is not "is this software perfect?" but "has FoodCore given me better information about my business than I had 7 days ago, and is that better information worth £19 or £55 per month?"
The specific questions worth answering: Did FoodCore save you time compared to your previous approach to recipe costing and allergen management? Do you have better information about your recipe costs than you had at the start of the week? Is your allergen management now more reliable and more documented than it was? Have you found any products that are underpriced, or any allergen declarations that were incorrect? If the answer to these questions is yes, FoodCore is almost certainly worth the subscription. Essentials at £19/month is less than a restaurant meal, less than an hour of accountancy advice, and less than most of the ingredient price rises you will have absorbed in the past year.
If you decide to continue, add your payment details before your trial ends and your subscription will begin from that point. Both plans are monthly with no minimum term — you can cancel at any time from your account settings, with no cancellation fee and no further charges after cancellation. If you cancel mid-month, you retain access until the end of the billing period you have paid for. If you decide not to continue, your account expires at the end of day seven with no charge made. There is nothing to cancel and nothing to do.
FoodCore plans compared
FoodCore offers two plans. Essentials at £19/month is designed for solo operators and small businesses with one or two people in the business. It includes: unlimited recipes, an ingredient database with allergen profiles for all 14 UK allergens, automatic recipe costing from ingredient data, allergen tracking and automatic propagation through sub-recipes, and PPDS label generation fully compliant with Natasha's Law. For the majority of home bakers and small food businesses — businesses with a defined range of products, selling primarily direct to consumers, without complex wholesale or multi-staff requirements — Essentials is the right plan.
Core at £55/month includes everything in Essentials and adds three features designed for businesses with more complex requirements. First, allergen matrix export: the ability to generate and export a formatted allergen matrix across your full product range, in a format suitable for sharing with wholesale buyers, retailers and food service customers. If you supply any business customer who will ask for an allergen matrix — which is effectively all of them — this feature pays for itself. Second, order tracking: the ability to log customer orders within FoodCore, link them to recipes, and track production requirements from those orders within the same system. Third, multiple user access: so a partner, kitchen assistant or production manager can have their own login and work within the account simultaneously. For sole traders, the multi-user feature is not needed. For businesses with two or more people involved in recipe management, allergen data or production, it removes the friction of sharing a single login.
Who should choose Essentials: home bakers, sole-trader food businesses, anyone who primarily needs recipe costing and PPDS labels, and anyone who sells only to end consumers rather than to wholesale buyers. Who should choose Core: businesses that need allergen matrix export for wholesale or food service customers, anyone managing kitchen staff who need their own access to the system, and businesses taking customer orders that they want to track and manage within FoodCore. If you are unsure, start with Essentials — you can upgrade to Core at any point, and your data transfers across without any loss or reconfiguration needed.
Getting support
If you have questions during your trial — about how to use a specific feature, or about whether FoodCore covers your particular use case — contact FoodCore at info@foodcore.io or use the contact form at /contact. FoodCore responds within 1 business day. Support covers both technical questions (how to do something in the software) and food business questions (for example, which plan is right for your business type, or whether a particular product is classified as PPDS under Natasha's Law). You do not need to be an existing paying customer to use support — the trial period is a good time to ask any questions that affect your decision to continue.
You can also follow FoodCore on Instagram at https://instagram.com/foodcore.io for tips, product updates and examples of how other food businesses use FoodCore day to day. The FoodCore blog contains detailed guidance on allergen compliance and Natasha's Law specifically — see /blog/allergen-management-software-uk for the allergen management software comparison and /blog/natashas-law-complete-guide for the complete Natasha's Law guide. For questions about pricing and plan details, /pricing has the full breakdown.
FoodCore: frequently asked questions
Does FoodCore have a free trial?
Yes. FoodCore offers a 7-day free trial with no credit card required. Sign up at signup.foodcore.io and choose either the Essentials or Core plan. You get full access to all features on your chosen plan for 7 days. If you decide to continue, add your payment details before the trial ends. If not, your account simply expires — no charge is made. The free trial is designed to give you enough time to set up your ingredient database, build your key recipes, check your costs and allergen data, and generate your first PPDS labels before deciding whether FoodCore is right for your business.
Do I need a credit card to start the FoodCore free trial?
No. The FoodCore 7-day free trial does not require a credit card. You can sign up at signup.foodcore.io with just your email address and create an account immediately. No payment details are required until you decide to continue after your trial. This means there is no risk of being charged unexpectedly — if you do not add a payment method, your trial simply ends after 7 days.
What plans does FoodCore offer?
FoodCore offers two plans. Essentials is £19/month and covers recipe management (unlimited recipes), recipe costing from an ingredient database, allergen tracking across all 14 UK allergens, and PPDS label generation. Core is £55/month and includes everything in Essentials plus allergen matrix export, order tracking, and multiple user support. Both plans include a 7-day free trial with no card required. For most home bakers and small food businesses just starting out, Essentials is the right starting plan. Core is suited to businesses that need allergen matrix export for wholesale customers, order management, or multiple team members in the account.
Can I cancel FoodCore at any time?
Yes. FoodCore subscriptions are monthly with no minimum term. You can cancel at any time from your account settings, and no further charges will be made after cancellation. If you cancel mid-month, you retain access until the end of the period you have paid for. There are no cancellation fees or penalties. This means you can try FoodCore, build out your recipes and allergen data, and cancel if it does not suit your needs — without any financial commitment beyond the month you are in.
Is FoodCore suitable for a very small home bakery?
Yes. FoodCore Essentials (£19/month) is specifically designed for solo operators and very small food businesses. There is no minimum user count and no minimum recipe volume. The typical FoodCore Essentials user is a home baker with 5–30 products who wants to know their true cost per recipe, meet their allergen obligations under Natasha's Law, and generate PPDS labels without designing them manually in Canva or Word. The 7-day free trial allows you to verify that FoodCore works for your specific products and workflow before committing.
Does FoodCore generate Natasha's Law compliant labels?
Yes. FoodCore generates PPDS labels compliant with Natasha's Law directly from recipe data. The label includes the product name, a full ingredients list in descending order by weight, and all 14 UK allergens automatically highlighted in bold within the ingredients list — exactly as required by Natasha's Law. Labels are formatted for standard label sizes. When you update a recipe, the label updates automatically — there is no separate label file to manage. This means you cannot accidentally sell a product with a label that does not reflect the current recipe.
How long does it take to set up FoodCore?
Most FoodCore users are up and running with their first recipe costed and allergen data set within a few hours of signing up. The typical first-session workflow: add your 10–20 most-used ingredients (name, supplier, pack size, pack cost, allergen profile) — this takes approximately 30–60 minutes. Then build your first recipe by selecting ingredients and entering quantities — FoodCore calculates the cost automatically. Add the allergen profile, generate a PPDS label if applicable, and you are done. You do not need to import your entire recipe catalogue on day one. Start with your best-selling products and expand from there.
Further resources
FoodCore is kitchen management software built for small UK food businesses. We handle recipe costing, Natasha's Law labels, allergen matrices and order tracking.
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