How do I merge duplicate ingredients?

Duplicate ingredients are an enemy of clean food data. Here's how to eliminate duplicates in Galley.

Clean food data will help you get the most out of Galley. Merging duplicate ingredients can make your team more efficient by increasing consistency across recipes and decreasing duplicative work, such as data repetitive data setup, cycle counting, and more. This article will walk you through how to merge duplicate ingredients and what data is maintained when ingredients are merged. 

Table of Contents

  1. How to Merge Ingredients
  2. What Happens to Ingredient Data in a Merge

 

How to Merge Ingredients

Duplicate ingredients can be merged from the Ingredients Catalog page. From this page, select the ingredients that you would like to merge together into another ingredient. Your selection can include the ingredient that you would like to merge into. Then, from the toolbar at the bottom of the screen click Merge.

You can then select the ingredient that you would like to merge all of the other ingredients into. The first ingredient you selected will be pre-filled, but you can adjust to a different ingredient using the search bar.

If the ingredient you are merging into another ingredient has an assumed preparation that you would like to associate with its recipe items (e.g. if you are merging Chopped Onion into the ingredient Onion), you can select the preparations from the available picker. These preparations will not be added to the recipe items originally associated with the ingredient you are merging into. 

When ready, clean Merge followed by Confirm. Once the operation is complete, your page will refresh and to show that the ingredients have been merged. 

Users must have the Merge Ingredients permission to perform this operation.

 

What Happens to Ingredient Data in a Merge

When merging ingredients, the data that exists on the ingredients that will be removed as a part of the merge is brought over to the ingredient that they are being merged into. For example, all recipe items, dietary flag associations, and unit conversions will be copied over to the resulting ingredient. If a field that can only have one value, such as the external id, a USDA ingredient association, or shelf life, is filled on the ingredient that is being merged into, the value before the merge will be maintained. If it does not, the field will be filled by the first of the ingredients that has the field filled. The priority order for this selection is based on the order in which the ingredients were picked from the catalog.

Files, Cooking Methods, Cycle Count Items, and Cycle Count Template Items will not be updated when ingredients are merged.