Compose Multi-Component Confections: Shells, Fillings and Layers

A Recipe Is Not a Product

A ganache recipe answers one question well: what is in this mass, and how does it behave on its own. A finished bonbon asks a different question. What happens when that ganache sits inside a chocolate shell, pressed against a salted caramel, in a sealed box at 20 °C for three weeks? No single recipe can answer it, because the answer belongs to the assembly rather than to any one of its parts. Two ganaches that each pass their own checks can still ruin each other across a shared face.

Products are where the assembly lives. A product is a composition built from work you have already done — saved recipes, catalogue ingredients, and other products you have saved a version of — arranged into the structure the piece actually has, with the contacts between the parts stated explicitly rather than guessed from the layout. Formul.io then calculates the finished item: total weight, composition, nutrition, water activity, shelf life, and moisture migration across every face that touches.

Open Products from the sidebar and choose New product. Each product appears as a card carrying its save status — Saved, Draft or Stale — and its tags, with Search products and Filter by tag above the list. Products are available on every plan.

Eight Starter Structures

A new product opens on Start with a structure. These are outlines, not product types. Each one creates named sections in the order the piece is built, and none of it is fixed afterwards: the app describes them as “Optional shortcuts only. You can change or remove every section.”

Sections hold one optional level of subgroups, which is enough for tiers, layers, fillings and finish without turning the outline into a filing system. Grouping stays optional throughout, and any component you never file sits in Ungrouped. Rename a section to whatever your kitchen calls it: the names are labels for people, and the calculation never reads them.

Replacing the structure on a product you have already started is deliberate and destructive in a bounded way. The output, composition, contacts and storage scenarios are replaced; the name and description survive. Once an outline matches the way you actually build, Save as template stores it under My templates with its components, quantities, contacts and storage scenarios intact, so the next box of the same family starts finished rather than empty.

Composition: Recipes, Ingredients and Saved Products

Add component opens a picker with three tabs — Recipe, Ingredient and Product. Recipes bring their calculated physics with them. Ingredients bring catalogue composition. A product can be used inside another product only after it has a saved version, and a product can never contain itself.

Each component carries two quantities, and the difference between them matters. Net quantity is what ends up in the finished piece, and it is the figure every physical calculation uses — composition, water activity, migration, shelf life, nutrition. Gross quantity is what you have to prepare to get there, including preparation loss, and it is the figure costing reads. Type a net quantity in the component row and gross follows it automatically until you set gross yourself in the component panel, after which the two stay independent.

Quantities accept g, kg, ml and pcs. Choosing a volume or a piece count asks for the one conversion the app cannot invent — Density, g/ml or Grams per unit — and stores it against that component only, so a thin syrup and a thick praline never share a number.

Every recipe and product component also has a Source revision. Left on Latest saved version, the component follows its source: change the recipe and the product knows. Pinned to a numbered revision, it does not, and the product keeps calculating the formulation you approved. When a recipe or ingredient behind an unpinned component changes, every product that uses it is marked stale, the metrics panel reads Recalculation needed, and Recalculate brings it current. Stale never silently becomes fresh, and it propagates through nested products that are themselves unpinned.

Contacts Decide Which Migration Is Modelled

This is the step that separates a product from a list of recipes, and the panel states the rule in one line: “Describe which components touch. Visual order never implies physical contact.” A ganache listed above a caramel may be separated by a chocolate floor, or pressed directly against it. Those are different pieces with different shelf lives, and no amount of reading the outline tells them apart. Until you say which it is, Stability and contacts stays Not configured and no migration figure is offered.

Apply contacts commits the choice, and the storage results appear underneath it. A single-component product skips this entirely and reports that it has no internal contacts to model.

Once contacts exist, each touching pair is rated by the water-activity gap across it. A gap above 0.15 is reported as High migration risk and above 0.10 as moderate; below that the pair is left alone. The Critical day is the first day on which a high-risk pair’s modelled shelf-life factor drops below 0.8 — in practice, the day the piece stops being the thing you sold rather than the day it becomes unsafe. A crisp shell against a wet fruit centre can reach it in a single day, which is a design problem, not a storage problem, and it is worth knowing before the first box ships.

Storage Scenarios, Water Activity and Shelf Life

Stability is not a single number, so the product does not pretend it is. Add scenario creates a named set of conditions — a scenario name, a temperature between −50 and 100 °C, and a storage system of Sealed or Open — and every scenario is calculated independently. Two quick options cover most of the work: 20 °C · sealed and 4 °C · sealed. Add a third for the display case if that is where the piece really lives.

The storage system selects how Formul.io reports composite water activity. Sealed reports the mass-weighted average of the component water activities. Open uses the highest component value as a conservative estimate. This calculation does not model moisture exchange with the surrounding air or predict equilibrium water activity during storage.

Limiting Aw is reported alongside, and it is always the wettest phase, never the average. Spoilage does not average: a small wet centre behind a large dry shell is still a small wet centre, and the 0.85 microbial-growth warning is asked of that phase by name. Shelf life is driven by the same limiting value, adjusted for the scenario temperature. It reads shorter than a single-recipe calculator does for the same water activity, and on purpose — an assembly knows its components’ water activities but not their pH, alcohol, sorbate or fat-barrier protection, so the composition hurdles that would lengthen the estimate are left out of it. For a piece built from parts, short is the safe direction to be wrong in.

Nutrition is calculated Per 100 g of product, mass-weighted across the components, and it is all-or-nothing: one component with no nutrition data leaves the whole figure Unavailable rather than quietly reporting a partial total.

Save a Version, Share a Page, Cost the Piece

The draft saves itself as you work; the header shows Draft saved when it has. Save version is the separate, deliberate act: it fixes a snapshot that later edits cannot change, which is what makes the product usable inside another product and shareable as a page. Version history keeps every snapshot, and Restore to draft brings an older one back to the editor without disturbing the record of what was saved.

Sharing is section-by-section rather than all-or-nothing. Basic product information is always visible; beyond that you choose which sections, ungrouped components, storage scenarios and metrics the public page carries, with Overview, Composition + nutrition and Technical details as quick presets. Component quantities and conversion factors are never exposed — a customer or a wholesale buyer sees that the piece contains a salted butter caramel and how it should be kept, not your ratios. Save a version before sharing, and save any later changes as a version before updating the public page.

Costing sits in the same editor. The Economics panel reads the gross quantities you entered, prices them from your saved prices, and reports Known batch costs with a Partial costs marker while any input is still missing, so a half-priced product never reads as a cheap one. Costing and margins are the one part of this workflow that needs Pro; composing, calculating and sharing products do not. For how to turn that figure into a defensible price, see pricing confectionery with costing and margins.

Questions About Composing Products