Cooked candies, like toffee, brittle, caramels and fudge, follow the same production pattern: weigh the sugar, butter and the rest; cook to a set temperature; pour and spread; coat or finish; cool; cut or break; pack and code. The temperature is the recipe. Sugar syrup changes stage as it heats, and a few degrees decide whether toffee snaps or chews, so a calibrated candy thermometer and a target written on the batch sheet do more for consistency than anything else. The other place a candy business wins or loses money is the end of the line: toffee and brittle are broken into pieces, and the broken bits that won't make a box are either sold as seconds or lost. Butter is milk, nuts are tree nuts by name, and the chocolate's soy lecithin is soy, so the label's allergen line comes from the recipe. In the example below, a Dallas toffee maker runs 300 boxes on a December day.
The short version
- Cooked candy steps: weigh, cook to temperature, pour, coat, cool, break or cut, pack, code.
- The temperature is the recipe: a calibrated thermometer and a target on the batch sheet.
- Pour and spread quickly, on a prepared slab or sheet.
- Cool completely before breaking or packing.
- Track breakage: seconds sold are margin kept.
- Allergens from the recipe: milk, tree nuts by name, soy from chocolate.
- TaroStack records each batch with its yield, its lot and its ingredient lots. More below.
The steps
| Step | What happens | What to record |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Weigh | Butter, sugar, salt, water by the recipe | Weights, ingredient lots |
| 2. Cook | To the target temperature, stirring | Final temperature |
| 3. Finish the cook | Vanilla or nuts stirred in off the heat | |
| 4. Pour and spread | Onto a prepared slab or lined sheet | |
| 5. Coat | Chocolate spread, nuts pressed in | Chocolate and nut lots |
| 6. Cool | Until set through | Time |
| 7. Break or cut | Into pieces | Good weight, seconds |
| 8. Pack and code | Boxed or bagged by weight, lot and best-by | Units, lot, best-by |
The toffee business's numbers are in toffee business plan, and the co-packer option in candy co-packers.
An example: 300 boxes on a December day
Bluebonnet Toffee Co., a made-up English toffee maker in Dallas, Texas, sells 8 oz boxes direct, wholesale and in corporate gift tins, with more than half its year's sales in November and December. Its process cooks to 300°F. One day:
| Step | What happened |
|---|---|
| Weigh | 10 batches: butter lot BT-1201, sugar lot SG-1115 |
| Cook | Each batch to 300°F on the calibrated thermometer, 18 to 20 minutes |
| Pour and coat | Onto lined sheets, milk chocolate lot MC-1110, toasted pecans lot PC-1105 |
| Cool | 2 hours, until set through |
| Break | 157 lb of good pieces, 6.5 lb of small bits set aside |
| Pack and code | 300 boxes of 8 oz, lot TF-1203, best by Mar 3; 6.5 lb of bits bagged as seconds |
Three hundred 8 oz boxes take 150 lb of toffee; the 157 lb of good pieces covered them with a little left for the next day's tins. The 6.5 lb of bits, 4% of the day, used to go in the bin; now they go into "toffee bits" bags for bakers at $6 a half pound. The label reads "Contains: milk, pecans, soy". What a box earns is in candy business profit margin.
Get the run sheet
Download the candy production run sheet. Two sheets: a blank run sheet to print for each batch, with the steps, the check at each and its target, and spaces for the actual reading, the time and initials; and the same run filled in from the example. It's an ordinary Excel file with no macros, and it works in Google Sheets, LibreOffice and Numbers.
Where this stops working
The run sheet covers a day. Ten batches a day through December, boxes, tins and seconds from the same toffee, and a corporate order that wants its lot numbers, is where the numbers need to live somewhere searchable.
How TaroStack does it
TaroStack records each batch with its yield, its lot and its ingredient lots.
Batches with yield. A day's toffee is a batch from its recipe, and what it made, good pieces and seconds, is recorded against what the recipe expected, so breakage shows up as a number.
Recipe truth. From your own batch history, TaroStack shows whether a recipe yields what it claims.
Lots and where they went. Boxes, tins and seconds carry the batch's lot, and each corporate order records the lots it got.
| The job | Clipboard | In TaroStack |
|---|---|---|
| Good pieces and seconds | Weighed, maybe written | Yield on the batch |
| Whether breakage is creeping up | Noticed late | Recipe truth from history |
| Which pecans went into a day's toffee | Written, maybe | Lots on the batch |
| Which corporate orders got a lot | Invoices | Lots on the order |
Recipes, batches, lots and recalls are on every plan, from $49 a month. The first 30 days are free, with no credit card. If you'd like a hand setting up, ask, and we'll do it with you.