a la calc Edu Edition is here!

Nutrition intake is indisputably key to the most important part of the human body, health. Because of this a la calc are dedicated to teaching future generations of everyone from home cooks to professional chefs how to calculate the nutritional content of their recipes.

Introducing..

a la calc Edu Edition

We've developed a set of tools specifically for use in the classroom by teachers and lecturers that aren't available to users of the manufacturing edition. These include:

• Creating of student unlimited accounts (simply import a spreadsheet of all your students)
• Student account management (reset passwords, group and organise)
• Teaching resources (lesson plans, coursework guides etc in association with TeamChefs.tv)
• Student work analysis (see how long a student has taken to complete a recipe and more)
• Reduced price plans and discounts for purchasing accounts for multiple schools/academies
• Extra, massive discounts for special circumstance, community projects, emotional behavioural development units (upon application)

New UK/EU Labels Now Available

Finally it's here.

The long awaited much, talked about, unified, consistent Front of Pack (FoP) nutritional labelling system was announced by the government a little over a month ago (press release, specification).

We at alacalc.co.uk pride ourselves on being up to date with the latest specifications and regulations regarding package labelling and are very proud to announce that the new specification labels are available for download from the website for all of your current recipes now.

Keep reading for more important info.

Our biggest update ever - including LIVE results updating, faster performance, new tools and image uploads!

Our regular readers will know we slave away tirelessly at improving the performance and productivity of a la calc.

The last couple months have been no exception.

It has been a while since our last lot of updates in March earlier this year, but it has been worth it!



Among this batch of improvements to website are:

• Completely rebuilt My Recipes overview including
• Select multiple recipes for download to PDF
• Framework for more exciting new features
• All new Recipe tab
• Nutrition tab has been rebuilt from the bare bones to include
• Live on-the-fly updating of nutrition and graphics
• UK and US style graphics accessibility improvements
• Ingredients with allergens highlighting
• Sub-recipe ingredients breakdown
• Seving size helper calculator
• Pack size helper calculator
• Image uploading
• Tutorials for each stage of the recipe creation and tweaking

For more details keep reading.

Important News: New UK front of pack labelling standard

Here it is, the news we have all been waiting for, the UK government has finally released details on the consistent all encompassing front-of-pack label.

The new label is seemingly a hybrid of the traffic lights system and the GDA calculations but with the added information of number of servings and energy in kilojoules (kJ) also included.

All the major supermarkets and many of the major manufacturers have already signed up the new system and so our users at alacalc.co.uk should do too.

We at alacalc.co.uk are now working hard on building the new graphic into our service. We anticipate that the new design will be built and tested within a few short weeks for all our customers to start using.

Please keep an eye here on our blog for news on when this update will be live and ready to use.

Top 25 Exhibitor at IFE and Feature Updates

It's been quiet here on the blog for the last couple of months, but that doesn't mean we've been taking it easy. We've been chosen as a top 25 exhibitor from IFE13 back in March, and been working hard on some fantastic new features that will greatly improve the productivity of a la calc.



IFE13 Top 25 Exhibitor

        "With fantastic products and outstanding customer service these companies stood out from the crowd"

We're proud to have been selected as a top 25 exhibitor by Show Review UK Magazine in their June/July issue containing an 11-page review of IFE13. It is great to be acknowledged for having a unique and valuable service and we hope it will be the first of many more to come.

Feature Updates

As followers of this blog and customers of a la calc will know, we are always striving to improve and add to the already impressive list of features on offer. The last couple of months has not been any different.

The first part of our next round of updates is the lifting of the beta of our US version of the website. This has already had a soft launch, but we are now ready to push this further.

Next is a new layout for the view all Recipes page. We're implementing the groundwork for batch operations on multiple recipes e.g. downloading a single PDF/XLS containing multiple recipes or downloading multiple JPEG files at once without the need for opening each recipe individually. We're excited as to the future functionality of this page so stay tuned to this blog for further details.

The creation of recipes and workflow leading to the Nutrition tab is going to be undergoing some streamlining changes too. The plan is to cut out unnecessary steps, clicks and page loads to make the process faster and more modern.

Finally, we're completely rebuilding the Nutrition tab to make loading much faster. Our early tests have shown the page to load twice as fast as previously for a 10 ingredient recipe. We hope to get this down to an absolute minimum but still maintain the layout and variety of information available.

The new build Nutrition tab will also herald a new set of functions that we'll reveal closer to the time of release. The new set of functions are aimed more towards our big users and but could also be invaluable to smaller users offering deeper insight and greater understanding of their recipes.



Make sure you stay connected to this blog for the latest updates and when they're ready for you.


Excited?
So are we!


Richard

IFE Review - Successful alacalc.com Debut

Kirsty and Simon at IFE13

Phew!

As many of you know last week was the IFE13 event at ExCel London and alacalc.com were making their debut appearance.

The reception for us couldn't have been better. We only had a small stand but such was the interest in our service that four of us could barely keep up with demonstrations and enquiries.

I'd like to extend a huge thank you to everyone who came to have a chat with us and who gave us feedback on what they'd like to see next from alacalc.com. We have hundreds of ideas busying around the design and technical teams now and we have a plan on where to go next to make our service even better for everyone interested in food and nutrition.


The Future

Amongst the ideas being drawn up for the coming year are (in no particular order):

• Extended costing features to help our users save money
• Revamped price plans to include speciality plans for educational purposes, organisations catering to children and young people and food consultants and affiliates
• Better foreign language support for outputting one recipe in different languages at the click of a button
• Exciting new nutrient features for refining recipes in order to meet target nutrient levels
• Much, Much more..

I hope you will agree that the future for alacalc.com is exciting, we're certainly excited and inspired around the office.

We've already booked to be back at the show in 2015, hope to see you all there!

Simon, Kirsty and myself demonstrating on mobile devices and monitors

Huge update: recipe costing, ingredient batching and more

The alacalc.com website has been live for just about a year now (although we have been in the food industry for many years).

As a happy birthday present to ourselves and our clients we're presenting our biggest upgrades to date including the long awaited, eagerly anticipated recipe costings, ingredient batching and the introduction of outputs compliant to US labelling standards.

We've all been working late nights for months to get these exciting new features ready for launch and are extremely pleased to finally be at a stage to present them.

Want to know more? Keep reading!

Come see us at IFE 2013 !

Some exciting news in this issue.

This year we're exhibiting at the IFE - International Food & Drink Event from 17th to 20th March 2013.

This is our first visit to the event and we invite all our current users and anyone who's interested (or not) to come by and say hi.

Some reasons to whet your appetite:

• More information on what exciting new features are to come
• Live demonstrations on how to make the best of the alacalc.com
• Great show offers for subscription plans and credit plans
• A chance to talk to the technical guys (including me)

Among the new features to be showcased and demonstrated at IFE13 will be our brand new cost calculation feature as requested by our users and the launch of our FDA compliant graphical outputs.

The cost calculation feature will allow entering a cost per weight for all the ingredients in use. This cost per weight will then be used to calculate the cost of each ingredient and will be displayed on a per batch size and serving size basis. This allows you to see exactly how much a large batch will cost in raw materials and how much that works out as per serving. Very useful.

The FDA compliant graphics means that alacalc.com will finally be able to output graphics as required for sale of products in the US. These graphics will be available to our UK users also and will be easily switch-able in the interface.

To be one of the first to try our new features come to IFE13 and find us in the General Food Hall next to The Skillery (stand S6244).

We look forward to seeing you in March !