The one-page spec a chef needs before your product goes on the menu

The moment it goes in the "later" pile

A chef tastes your product and likes it. That is the hard part done, or it should be. They can already see it written up on next week's specials. Then they go to add it to the kitchen's allergen sheet, the one every dish on the board has to have an answer against, and they stop on a blank they cannot leave blank: what exactly is in this, and is there anything in it a guest could react to?

If the answer is not to hand, the dish does not go on. It goes in the pile of things to sort out later. Later has a way of not coming.

For about a decade I was on the other end of that order, the person in the kitchen receiving from producers. Plenty of them handed over a good product, a price, and nothing else. And a good product with a question mark hanging over it is easy to like and easy to postpone, because the chef cannot commit it to a menu on taste alone.

Why this is the kitchen's problem, and why that is your opening

Once your product is an ingredient in one of their dishes, the question stops being about you. It becomes theirs. A guest asks the front of house whether the special has nuts in it, and the kitchen has to answer, correctly, without a pause. "The supplier never told us" is not an answer anyone can stand behind. The exposure, legal and reputational, is now sitting in their kitchen.

This is not me giving you the law, and the piece is not that. It is the reason a chef cares. The kitchen carries the consequence of what is in your box, so anything left unwritten is a risk they are being asked to take on trust.

Which is exactly why the producer who hands over what is in the box, before anyone asks, becomes the easy yes. You have taken the one thing the chef could not fill in themselves and filled it in.

What actually goes on it

Keep it plain. This is not a place for the story of your sourcing or a paragraph of marketing. A chef reads it in seconds and moves on.

• The full ingredient breakdown. Everything that is actually in the product, including the things a buyer would not see: the oil you finish it in, a dressing, a preservative, an anti-caking agent, whatever it is. If it went into the product, it goes on the list.
• The allergens present. The ones a guest might ask about and a kitchen has to declare. For a baker that is often gluten, egg, nuts. For someone else it is milk, or soya, or sesame in the seed mix. Name them plainly rather than making the chef read the ingredients and work it out.
• The "may contain" allergens. The ones that are not an ingredient but could be there anyway, from a shared bench, shared equipment, or how the product is packed. A chef would far rather see this stated than discover it.

That third line is the one producers skip, and it is the one that protects both of you. If you pack nut products and seed products on the same table, say so.

Even "just microgreens" needs it in writing

There is a trap for the single-ingredient producer. My microgreens were about as close to "just the plant" as a product gets. Nothing added, nothing to hide. It is exactly that kind of product that tempts you to skip the spec, because writing one down feels daft when the answer looks so obvious.

But "obvious" is a word that only works at your end. The chef cannot write "obvious" on their board. They need it in writing, from the supplier, dated and specific, the same as they would for anything else, because that is the record they are relying on if a guest ever reacts. A loaf that is "just bread" still has flour and often egg and butter in it. The single ingredient does not get you off the sheet. It just makes the sheet quicker to write.

Date it, and reissue it when something changes

A spec is only worth anything if it matches what you actually delivered this morning. So put a date on it.

The day you change a recipe, swap a supplier, or start finishing something in a different oil, the old spec is wrong, and a wrong spec is worse than none because the kitchen is trusting it. Reissue it, with the new date, and send it round to everyone on it. This is the same discipline as keeping a price list current: the document is a promise about what is true now, not a leaflet you wrote once.

Send it before they ask

The best time for a chef to receive your spec is before they have to email you for it. Every question a buyer has to chase you for is a small reason to go with the supplier who did not make them chase.

So it rides along with the first handover. Attach it to the wholesale price list, or send it with the first order, so the chef gets the price, the ordering detail and what is in the box in one go. It is the same move as answering a café's ordering questions before they ask them, applied to the contents rather than the terms.

If you already run your price list and orders through makeweek, the spec can ride along in that same handover: a document you write, keep current and send yourself, rather than something the chef has to prise out of you. Nothing writes it for you, and you would not want it to, because the one person who knows what really goes into your product is you.

A layout you can build in a document

You do not need anything clever for this. Open a blank document and give each product its own page with these lines:

• Product name, exactly as it appears on your price list, so there is no guessing which one this is.
• Ingredients, listed out, including everything added.
• Allergens present, named.
• May contain, from how it is made or packed.
• Date, and your name and a way to reach you with a question.

That is the whole thing. One page, per product, and you have a set you can reissue in minutes when something changes.

What it does at the other end

From a decade on the buying side, I know what a missing spec does. A product the kitchen liked stalls, and it stalls quietly, while it waits for the answer that should have arrived with it.

When the spec is there, the sentence in the chef's head changes. "Let me check what's in it and get back to you" becomes a decision they can make while your product is still on the bench. You have turned the last stall into a yes, and it cost you a page.