Product tour
A walk through everything AreaCacao can do for your workshop and the tool that solves each need.
AreaCacao brings together in a single app the tasks that usually live scattered across notebooks, spreadsheets, and the chef's head: formulating, costing, digitizing recipes, and analyzing tastings. This tour shows you what each area does and when to reach for it.
What does AreaCacao solve?
- Design formulas with technical rigor, not by eye: macro balances, ranges by product type, and AI suggestions.
- Move your paper recipe book to digital without typing in every single quantity.
- Know how much each production run costs with an ingredient catalog and costing that's always up to date.
- Analyze your products like a professional panel: descriptive and discriminative tastings, shelf life, and reports.
How the app is organized
All the day-to-day work lives in a sidebar on the left. From top to bottom you'll find:
Dashboard
The first item in the bar (house icon). It's your home screen: activity summary, AI credits, current plan, and quick links. You cover it in detail in Dashboard tour.
Formulation
The main work block. Its sections, in order:
- My recipes — the list of all your recipes, with a search box and access to the editor.
- Filling formulator — design ganaches, caramels, fruit jellies, and more with AI help. It's the flagship tool.
- Chocolate formulator — calculate the formula for your couverture or bar from your targets.
- Import recipes — turn a photo or a recipe PDF into a structured sheet. Covered in the Import recipes guide.
- Ingredients — the catalog with the technical sheets (macros, allergens, density) that feed your recipes.
- Costs — the cost per gram and per production run of each recipe, always aligned with your catalog prices.
The formulators and import consume AI credits from your plan; the rest of the block doesn't consume credits.
Sensory analysis
A section with its own header, orange and clickable: tapping it takes you into the Sensory analysis hub, where all the tasting work lives. Under the header you have two shortcuts:
- Evaluations — your tastings and studies.
- Descriptive tasting — a shortcut that opens a descriptive tasting directly at the samples step.
The More in sensory link at the foot of the section also leads to the hub. Inside the hub you'll find the rest of the tools (panels, training, protocols, attributes, batches, shelf life, sheets, and reports); they aren't standalone items in the bar, but sections within the module itself. The Sensory module is part of the Pro plan: on the Starter plan you'll see these links marked as PRO and, when you tap them, an invitation to upgrade your plan instead of opening the tool.
Support
At the foot of the bar, set off by a line, is Support: the help and contact channel.
The Create button
Above the navigation there's a Create button with two options:
- New recipe — opens the What do you want to formulate? selector with three paths: recipe from scratch (a blank sheet), Filling formulator, or Chocolate formulator.
- New sensory evaluation — starts a new tasting.
Your account
Your name and avatar appear at the top of the sidebar. Tapping them opens the user menu with Settings and Log out (and, when applicable, the management of your subscription). Right next to it, the notifications bell alerts you to whatever needs your attention.