Formulation
The heart of the craft in AreaCacao: your recipes, the filling and chocolate formulators, recipe importing, the ingredient catalog, supplies, and cost management.
What you'll find here
Formulation is where every product in your workshop is born and lives. From here you create recipes (by hand or with AI help), balance them, calculate their macros and their real cost, and save them ready for production.
Everything you formulate rests on a shared foundation: a catalog of more than 10,000 ingredients with verified macronutrients, EU-14 allergens, and density, which feeds the recipe editor, both formulators, and the automatic cost calculation alike.
Where do I start?
It depends on what you have on hand:
- You already have a recipe (in your head, on paper, or in a PDF) → save it in My recipes or digitize it with Import recipes.
- You want a chocolate formula based on the cocoa percentage and the fluidity → use the Chocolate formulator.
- You need a balanced, validated filling (ganache, caramel, gelled filling, praline, or truffle) → use the Filling formulator.
- You want to know how much it costs to produce each recipe → keep the Costs section up to date.
The seven areas of Formulation
My recipes
The list of all your recipes with search, filters, and the full editor: ingredients, method, costs, and yield.
Filling formulator
Need a made-to-measure filling? Generate technically balanced and validated ganaches, caramels, gelled fillings, pralines, and truffles with AI.
Chocolate formulator
Design your chocolate scene by scene (type, sweetening, and parameters) and get the formula to the gram, which saves itself as a recipe. Each generated formula costs 2 credits.
Import recipes
Have your recipe in a photo, a PDF, or a spreadsheet? The app turns it into a structured recipe mapped to the catalog.
Ingredient catalog
More than 10,000 sheets with macros, allergens, and density. Search them, review them, and extend them with your custom fields.
Supplies
Packaging, candy cups, boxes, and labels: their own catalog, their use in recipes, and their own line in the cost breakdown.
Cost management
How much does each recipe really cost? Ingredient prices, labor and equipment rates, and your business's fixed costs.
How they fit together
The seven areas aren't watertight compartments; they share data and feed one another:
- The formulators (chocolate and filling) generate a formula that saves itself as a normal recipe in My recipes.
- Import recipes creates recipes from images, PDFs, or spreadsheets, also editable in the same editor.
- The recipe editor draws on the ingredient catalog for each component and automatically calculates macros, allergens, and unit conversion.
- The prices you record in Costs are reflected in the Costs tab of each recipe, and vice versa: editing a cost inside a recipe also saves it to the price history.
None of these seven areas is restricted by plan: they're available to any signed-in account. The only things that consume credits from your monthly quota are generating a filling or a chocolate, importing a recipe from an image or PDF, and the Cost Assistant; importing from a spreadsheet costs no credits.