Culinary Operations System
Amritha Heritage
A full kitchen operating manual for a heritage hotel's restaurant, covering recipes, SOPs, live food costing and food safety, generated from a single source of truth.
Overview
Amritha Heritage is a heritage boutique hotel in Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, and home to Kohinoor Restaurant. The kitchen ran a menu of around 120 to 130 dishes across soups, starters, mains, seafood, vegetarian, rice and noodles, pasta, breads, desserts and beverages. It had no written house standard: no consistent recipes, no documented procedures, and no clear view of what each plate cost to produce.
TAKE OVER built a complete culinary operations system from the dish names alone. We wrote a “house standard” recipe and Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) for every dish and delivered them to the hotel's culinary team for review. Around those recipes we built a live costing engine and a food safety programme.
The system is engineered like software, not written like a document. Every recipe is a structured data file, and this is the single source of truth. The printed manuals and the costing workbook are generated from that data automatically. When a recipe or an ingredient price changes, every output stays consistent, and Git keeps a full version history of every change.
What we built
Recipe & SOP manuals
Per-category Recipe & SOP PDFs covering the full menu of about 125 dishes, plus a master index PDF. Each recipe includes ingredients, quantities, method, and a dated cost snapshot.
Live Excel costing workbook
- An Ingredient Master sheet holds every ingredient with a unique code, purchase unit and current price.
- Each recipe sheet pulls prices automatically by ingredient code (XLOOKUP), so updating one price updates the cost of every dish that uses it.
- Purchase-to-recipe unit conversion (for example, buying by the kg, using by the gram).
- Yield % handling: reference defaults for trim and cooking loss, which the kitchen can override with its own tested values.
- Costed in ₹ INR and metric units, measured against a ~27% target food-cost benchmark.
Food Safety & HACCP manual
A dedicated Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points document for the kitchen.
Single source of truth
Recipes are stored as structured JSON/YAML and joined to prices only through ingredient codes. The PDFs and the Excel workbook are generated from that data with Python, so there are no duplicate copies to drift out of sync.
Branded house style
All documents use a bespoke heritage design of green, gold and cream, set in Cinzel, Cormorant Garamond and Lato, with gold-framed covers and consistent header and footer bands.
Review-first workflow
The SOPs are delivered as a professional house standard for the hotel's chefs to review and adopt.
Built with
- Python
- python-docx
- openpyxl
- JSON/YAML data model
- Excel (XLOOKUP costing engine)
- Git version control