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How to use Hubl —
Products & Allergens

Products & Allergens is your catalogue — every item with its category, unit and cost, its dietary flags and ingredients, and its allergens mapped against all 14 UK allergens. It powers your wastage costs, your allergen answers at the counter, and keeps an audit trail of every change. Here’s the whole flow.

The one thing to learn

One product, four quick parts

Every product in the catalogue is the same short form. Fill these four parts and you’re done:

Basics name · category · unit

Name it, pick Food, Ingredient, Drink or Other, then a unit.

£ Cost per unit prices wastage

What a kg, g or unit costs you — this prices every wastage entry.

Dietary & ingredients yes · no · not sure

Vegan and Vegetarian flags, plus the ingredient list as quick chips.

Allergens tap to cycle

Mark each of the 14 allergens — Contains, May contain, or clear.

Good to know The Unit box stays locked until you’ve picked a category — and the cost you enter here is exactly what turns your wastage log into real £ figures.
The catalogue and its filters — vegan, vegetarian, category and allergens (shown at 2× speed)
Start here Products & Allergens

Browse & filter the catalogue

Open the menu (☰) and tap Products & Allergens — or tap the Products card on the Overview screen, which shows how many items are in your allergen catalogue.

  1. Every card shows the lot at a glance — price per unit, Vegan / Vegetarian, the Contains and May contain allergen icons, and the ingredients.
  2. Use Search to find a product by name in seconds.
  3. Tap the filter icon to narrow the list — by Vegan or Vegetarian (Yes / No / Not sure), by Category, or by allergen.
  4. Tap Reset to clear the filters and see everything again.
Good to know A customer asks “what’s vegan and nut-free?” — two filter taps and the catalogue is your answer, right at the counter.
Creating “cheese roll” — basics, cost, dietary, ingredients and allergens (shown at 2.5× speed)
Build the catalogue + New product

Add a product

Tap + on the Products & Allergens screen and work down the form:

  1. Give it a Name and pick a Category — Food, Ingredient, Drink or Other.
  2. Choose the Unit (mg, g, kg, oz or lb) — it unlocks once the category is set.
  3. Enter the Cost per unit — £5 / kg here. Get the unit right first so the price means what you think it means.
  4. Set the Dietary flags — Vegan and Vegetarian, each Yes, No or Not sure.
  5. Add the Ingredients — type them separated by commas and they become chips you can remove with a tap.
  6. Mark the Allergens: tap an icon once for Contains, again for May contain, once more to clear. Then tap Create product.

The 14 allergens on the grid:

CeleryGlutenCrustaceansEggFishLupinMilkMolluscsMustardNutsPeanutsSesameSoyaSulphites
Good to know “May contain” is for genuine cross-contamination risk — shared fryers, open prep areas — not a catch-all. Recording it honestly is what makes the catalogue trustworthy.
Editing an allergen, the label warning, and the product history trail (shown at 2× speed)
Keep it honest Edit · History

Change it — and prove it

Recipes change, suppliers change. When they do, the catalogue keeps up — and keeps the receipts:

  1. Tap a product to Edit it — the same form, pre-filled. Update the cost, ingredients or allergens and save.
  2. Change anything allergen-related and Hubl warns you on the spot: “Allergen labels must be updated before service.”
  3. The card now reads Updated today, so the team can see it’s fresh.
  4. Open History from the menu at the top of the screen — every creation and every allergen change, with who made it, and the date and time.
Labels are the law If you sell food prepacked for direct sale, Natasha’s Law means the label must carry a full ingredient list with allergens emphasised. Treat the “update your labels” warning as a job to do before the product is next served — not a note for later.
The bigger picture Reporting dashboard

Manage products on the dashboard

Everything the app does, the reporting dashboard does at a desk — with the whole catalogue in one table. Open Products in the sidebar:

  1. The table shows every product across your sites — category, unit, cost, Vegan / Vegetarian and the allergen icons — with counters and filters along the top.
  2. Click a product to edit it — the same fields as the app, including the tap-to-cycle allergen grid.
  3. View history shows the audit trail — here, four allergens updated on Cheese Pizza in one edit, logged with who and when.
  4. Use + New Product to add items one at a time, exactly as on the phone.
The Products table, editing allergens and the product history trail (shown at 2.5× speed)
Fastest way in Template → Bulk Upload

Bulk upload products & allergens

Setting up a full catalogue — or taking on a new supplier list? Don’t type it product by product. The dashboard does it in one pass:

  1. Click Template to download the CSV — one row per product, with a column for the name, category, unit and cost, and one for each of the 14 allergens.
  2. Fill it in using a spreadsheet — categories and units as in the app, and allergen columns set to Yes, No or May contain.
  3. Click Bulk Upload and choose your completed CSV.
  4. The Verify Import screen shows exactly what’s about to happen — each product with its price, ingredients and allergens, and existing products marked Merge so they’re updated rather than duplicated.
  5. Happy? Click Import — the new products appear in the table (and in the app’s catalogue) immediately.
Template download, the CSV in Excel, then Verify Import — four products in one go (shown at 2.5× speed)
Good to know Bulk upload merges by product name — so re-uploading a corrected CSV updates the matching products rather than creating copies. It’s the easy way to refresh supplier prices across the catalogue too.
Before you ask

Quick answers

Why does the Unit box say “Pick category first”?

The unit list belongs to the category, so it stays locked until you’ve chosen Food, Ingredient, Drink or Other — then pick mg, g, kg, oz or lb.

What’s the difference between Contains and May contain?

Contains means the allergen is in the recipe. May contain records a genuine cross-contamination risk — a shared fryer or prep surface. Tap the icon once for Contains, again for May contain, once more to clear.

Where is the cost per unit actually used?

Wastage. Every wastage entry is priced as quantity × the product’s cost per unit — so keeping costs current keeps your waste figures honest.

Who changed the allergens on this product?

Open History from the menu at the top of Products & Allergens. Every change is logged — what changed, who made it, and exactly when.

I’m not sure if a product is vegan — what do I pick?

Pick Not sure rather than guessing. It’s filterable, so you can pull up everything marked Not sure and resolve them with your supplier.

My CSV import shows “Merge” against some rows — is that bad?

No — it means a product with that name already exists, so the upload will update it instead of creating a duplicate. The Verify Import screen always shows you before anything is written.

Can I pause the clips?

Tap or click any clip to pause it; tap again to play.

Your catalogue is the single source of truth behind wastage costs and allergen answers — and its history is your evidence of due diligence. Update it the moment a recipe or supplier changes, and the rest of Hubl stays right automatically.