Skip to content

Buying an ingredient by weight (loose)

Some ingredients don’t come in a container. You buy flour, beef, or loose sugar by the kilo, and oil by the litre, straight off the scale or the deli counter. For these, there is no bottle, bag, or box to describe — and you shouldn’t have to invent one.

The rule

If you buy it loose by weight or volume, pick the weight/volume as the physical form — there is no “net weight” to fill in.

How it works

On the item’s Cost & packaging card, open Physical form. The list is grouped:

  1. Sold loose — by weight / volume — kg, g, L, ml. Pick one of these when you buy by weight with no fixed pack.
  2. Counted by the piece — each, unit, piece (eggs, lemons, whole chickens).
  3. In a fixed container — bottle, can, bag, box… (a 750 ml bottle, a 25 kg sack).

Choose, say, kg (loose) for flour. The form collapses to the essentials: the “net weight per bag” question disappears, and you just enter the price per kg at the top. That’s it — the system works out the cost per recipe unit from there. A recipe that uses “200 g of flour” is costed automatically.

A fixed pack is different: a 25 kg sack of flour at one price is a container, so pick bag and enter its 25 kg net weight. Loose is for “priced per kilo, no pack”.

Good to know

  • The price line follows your choice — pick kg (loose) and it reads Price per kg.
  • You can still say recipes count this in g while you buy it in kg — set the recipe unit to g; the conversion is automatic.
  • If you previously faked a “bag” for a by-the-kilo item and saw a “unit mismatch” warning, that’s fixed — switch the physical form to kg (loose) and the warning clears.
  • Stock for a loose item shows in the same unit you buy it (e.g. 5 kg on hand), with no confusing duplicate line.