Technological card for a dish: structure, yield calculation and a worked sample

A technological card records how a specific dish is made: how much raw material goes in, what happens to it at each stage, and how many grams should end up on the plate. One sheet per menu item.

It sounds like paperwork. In practice the cards are where the conversation starts when a food safety inspector walks into the kitchen, when you need to cost out a month of purchasing, and when the cook resigns and somebody else has to make the dish.

Three groups need them. Education: schools, preschools, children's camps. Food service: cafes, restaurants, catering companies, canteens on industrial sites. And food producers with their own kitchen operation.

Over 12+ years we have supported more than 200 food safety implementation projects, and technological cards show up in almost every one. Usually not because they are missing, but because they no longer match what the kitchen actually does.

Below: the fields of a card, the two formulas for yield, a full worked sample, and what an inspector sees when they pick a card up.

Ukraine has no single approved template for a technological card. What exists is a set of data without which the card stops doing its job, and that set is what gets checked. The practical minimum looks like this.

The process description is usually written in two sentences, and that is a mistake. An auditor reads it to work out whether the process is controlled at all. "Boil until done" is not controlled. "Boil for 25 minutes after the water returns to the boil, core temperature no lower than 74 °C" is.

That 74 °C figure is not set by Ukrainian rules; it comes from international practice (the FDA Food Code). But an internal criterion with a number and a stated way to measure it always beats "until done", because it can be verified.

Ukrainian rules do not require a separate allergen field, but we recommend adding one. It costs five minutes while you are writing the card and removes an objection the first time a retail customer or a GFSI-scheme audit arrives.

Three weights that get mixed up more than anything else. The product loses mass twice: first during trimming and butchering, then during heat treatment.

Step 1. Gross to net.

Net = Gross − waste from mechanical processing

Waste here means peel, bones, trimmings. The norms come from a recipe collection and depend on the type of raw material, its grade and the season. Potatoes in March produce more waste than in September, and the collections account for that in separate columns.

Step 2. Net to yield.

Yield = Net − losses during heat treatment

Here mass goes to evaporated water and rendered fat. Meat loses more than vegetables, frying takes more than poaching.

Calculate in that order and record both intermediate figures. A card with only gross and yield is not formally defective, but during an inspection you will not be able to explain where the number came from, and that alone raises questions.

Exact norms come from a recipe collection for the specific raw material. The last column shows which figures come from the published waste and heat-treatment loss norms for vegetables and which come from industry practice and need checking against your own collection.

Grains behave the opposite way to everything else in that table: they do not lose mass when cooked, they take on water and gain it. They do produce waste, just very little: 1 to 1.5% in sorting and rinsing plus around 1% in portioning, and the collections already fold that into the stated yield.

That is why cards for porridge are built from dry grain and the yield is verified on the finished dish. When a card for buckwheat porridge shows a yield equal to the grain input, the error is visible at a glance.

Seasonality shows up most clearly on potatoes. The waste norm changes five times a year, so a card written in September no longer reflects reality by March.

Take mashed potatoes for 100 portions at a yield of 150 g. It is the most common line in a school menu, and it shows the whole calculation clearly.

You need 15 kg of finished mash. Work backwards: from the yield to the purchase order. Milk, butter and salt account for 3.6 kg, so you need 11.4 kg of boiled potato, and the net weight before boiling is 11.4 / 0.97 = 11.75 kg. Gross then depends on the season. Take November, with 30% waste.

The process description for this card reads:

1. Sort the potatoes, wash, peel, wash again.
2. Cut into even pieces, drop into boiling salted water.
3. Boil 20–25 minutes until soft, drain.
4. Mash while still hot: mashing cooled potato gives a gluey texture.
5. Add hot boiled milk and melted butter, mix through.
6. Bring back to the boil, hold on the serving line at no lower than 65 °C, serve within 2 hours.

Step 6 is not decoration. No lower than 65 °C for mains and sides, and no more than 2 hours on the hot line, is a sanitary requirement rather than a preference: below that temperature microbial growth starts. Those are exactly the lines an inspector will cross-check against your temperature log.

Now the season. In November potato gross is 16.8 kg; from 1 March, when waste rises to 40%, the same 100 portions need 19.6 kg. That is nearly three kilograms of difference on a single dish. A site that calculates on one figure all year under-serves in spring and overpays in autumn.

Three documents that regularly get confused or squeezed into one. They answer different questions.

The working rule is simple. The dish is in a recipe collection and you cook it by the collection: a technological card is enough. The dish is your own, or you have changed the composition or the process: you need a TTC, because it records the indicators the collection does not carry.

The costing card lives separately, in accounting. It leans on the same input norms, so a recipe change means editing both documents. A mismatch between them gets caught quickly: one quantity in the card, another in the costing, and the questions land on both at once.

Catering in Ukrainian education is governed by Cabinet of Ministers Resolution 305 of 24.03.2021. The version in force dates from 07.07.2026, with the latest amendments introduced by Resolution 854 of 01.07.2026, so open the current text before you build any documentation.

What the resolution says about technological documentation directly:

• clause 13: for procurement, the weight of food products is calculated in gross according to the technological documentation for dishes and products;
• clause 9: products for preparation are calculated according to the technological documentation;
• clauses 8 and 10: catering runs on a sample four-week seasonal menu, with dish rotation planned in line with the norms.

Note the wording. The resolution works with the concept of "technological documentation for dishes and products" rather than literally requiring "a technological card for every dish". In practice the cards are what makes up that documentation, but if somebody cites a specific clause that mandates a card, ask to see it.

The word "seasonal" in the menu requirement has a practical consequence that rarely gets mentioned. Seasonality applies not only to the set of dishes but to waste norms: the same potato gives different gross weights in spring and autumn. An institution running one set of cards all year either overpays or under-serves.

We covered HACCP in schools separately in the piece on HACCP in a school canteen, which lists the full document set, the equipment requirements and a typical inspection scenario.

A recipe collection gives you ready norms for input, waste and losses. That saves time and removes half the questions during an inspection: you cite a recipe number instead of defending your own figures.

Deviating from a collection is allowed and is normal practice. The conditions:

• you may substitute or drop raw materials that are unavailable, except the core components of the dish (borscht without beetroot remains a question);
• you may add ingredients in the quantities needed;
• the change must not damage taste, break the process regime, or affect safety.

The main condition is not the substitution itself but how it is recorded. The change has to go into the technological card and into the costing card. An undocumented substitution looks the same to an inspector no matter how sensible it was: the card says one thing, the kitchen does another.

Education has less room to move, because any change has to keep the menu within the norms of Resolution 305. The menu recommended by the Ministry of Health can be used without separate approval, but only if all components of the dishes are used in full and the preparation processes are unchanged. Change the composition and you document it yourself.

Law 771/97-VR obliges food business operators to run permanent procedures based on HACCP principles. A technological card is not named separately in the list of mandatory system documents. But when an auditor checks whether processes are described and critical points are controlled, the cards are what they open.

The link is direct. A critical control point at the boiling stage sets a temperature and a time: those numbers belong in the card, not only in the HACCP plan. Storage conditions and shelf life in the card have to match what the logs record. When the card says "no lower than 65 °C" and the serving log shows 58 °C, the gap takes a minute to find.

What the inspector actually looks at:

• whether cards exist for every item on the current menu, not on a menu from three years ago;
• whether the ingredients in the card match the delivery notes for raw material;
• whether the yield in the card matches what gets weighed on the serving line;
• whether temperature regimes agree with the HACCP plan and the logs;
• whether the cards are approved by the manager and carry a date.

Fines for the absence of a working HACCP system run from UAH 50,000 for sole traders and small businesses to UAH 170,000 for legal entities, and a repeat breach within a year doubles the amount. Cards themselves are not fined under a separate article: they become the evidence that the system either works or exists only on paper.

If you are building the documentation set from scratch, look at the pack of 25 HACCP document templates, and the general requirements of the standard are covered on the HACCP page.

The list below comes from supporting inspections on food production sites. It is short, because the findings repeat.

A technological card pays for itself in daily work rather than during an inspection: when the menu costs out without guesswork, when a new cook produces the same dish as the last one, and when the question "why is the portion 150 grams" has an answer with numbers behind it. The inspection only reveals whether you actually work that way.

If the cards need bringing into line with a specific menu or ahead of an audit, we walk the kitchen with your technologist and leave a working set rather than a folder for the shelf.