Avoid until major issues are addressed
Due to open my new shop soon and decided on using these for creating labels and using costing for my menu.
Platform looked and felt simple enough for anyone to use as i was going to have someone enter all the data for me.
I had entered one item and noticed immediately a few flaws in the platform.
Minor issue- all prices are in $ and cant be changed to £ - not a big issue as prices are shown on our labels
Inconvenient issue- they dont use any liquid measures other than quarts, gallons & ounces. I'm in the UK and we use the metric system. You can select the recipe as a liquid recipe but this doesnt change any settings other than tick a box stating its liquid. The only way i could do this is if i weighed out every liquid i use as each one has different density. Way to time consuming and not accurate at all.
Another inconvenient is when recording the ingredients with suppliers name or brand name, this shows up on the labels. So Brakes baked beans doesnt show as beans. The label ends up being twice as long as it should.
So simple baked beans on toast showed as Hovis Thick White Sliced bread (plus ingredients), Lakeland Dairies Salted Butter (plus ingredients), St Nicholas Baked Beans (plus ingredients), Kerrymaid Grated White Cheddar Cheese (plus ingredients) where as it should have simply been:
White Bread (= ingred), Butter (= ingred), Beans )+ ingred), Cheese (+ ingred)
Major issue - nutritional data is calculated wrong. When entering Kcal, i checked it against nutricalc, nutritics & other databases data. Everytime i checked a different kcal value, the resulting KJ was way out.
E.g. Kcal is 181per 100g - food label maker calculated 757.3 KJ, but everyone else calculated 753. Doesnt sound like much but when this is one ingredients in a 10-12 ingredients dish, it causes major differences.
Percentages are way out as well. Create the exact same dish on 4 different platforms.
All stated 19% fat per RDI, food labelmaker had it at 14%.
All stated 9% kcal of RDI, Food labelmaker had it at 16%
Also here in UK, we dont track Sodium in mcg, only Salt in g. But there isnt an option to add salt in g on the platform so each ingredients Salt levels needs to be calculated manually by divide weight of salt in g by 2.5, then mutliply by 1000 to get the sodium level.
I contacted them via email and was told to check my settings (made sure label was UK, which it was))
I emailed back to state i had done everything correctly (i'm not new at this by a long shot) and got the standard, I've passed this on to our tech guys and will get back to you. Absolutely no good when i am due to open soon and
Platform looks all good until you check the actual data. Until the calculations are adressed, i would avoid this platform
Stupidly paid for a years subscription (£250 approx) for this and until the above issues are addressed, its no more than an expensive recipe costing website.
The website seems to be aimed at people who dont use the metric system, or any liquid measures and not worried about incorrect nutirtional data.
Also before signing up, make sure you use an old redundant bank account that you only out money in as needed. I have requested a refund based ont he fact theyve sold a faulty system but havent been given this despite the website also stating that the GUARANTEE REGULATORY COMPLIANCE
("Our nutrition experts are always up-to-date with the latest food labeling regulations and guidelines and work closely with the food authorities in different markets to ensure the labels are generated in compliance with current laws. Our ingredient database is also based on the USDA-ingredient database to ensure accurate nutrition facts for each ingredient. Any new ingredient added to our database is verified and cross-checked by one of our nutrition experts before going live for public use in our software")
Ive also noted on forums and other reviews on here that they will keep taking payments until you cancel the subscription, but there isnt anywhere on the system that you can actually cancel the service., so if you sign up, expect for recurring charges to come out of your account.
I use to use Kafoodle before but for what i was using, this software seemed a better option.
I'll be going back to Kafoodle now
Date of experience: September 02, 2024
