Reusing stages with templates

Most recipes share stages. The sanitation sequence before a run, the changeover between allergens, the equipment prep on a particular line — these tend to be identical across every product you make, and retyping them for each recipe is both slow and a source of drift.

A stage template is that stage, saved once and imported wherever you need it. Find them on the Recipes page, under the Stage templates tab.

What's worth templating

Good candidates are stages where the steps are the same regardless of what you're making:

• Equipment prep — bringing a line up to running condition.
• Sanitation — the clean-down sequence and its verification.
• Changeover — what happens between two products on the same line.
• Quality check — a standard set of checks you run at the same point.
• Packaging — a fill-and-case routine shared across SKUs.
• Maintenance — a scheduled routine performed as part of a run.

Stages where quantities or targets differ per product are usually a poor fit. You'll spend longer correcting the imported copy than you would have spent building it.

Building a template

1. Open the Stage templates tab

   From Recipes, switch to Stage templates.

2. Create the template

   Give it a name your team would recognise, pick a category from the list above, and add a description so whoever imports it later knows what it's for and when to use it.

3. Build its items

   Add the tasks, measurements, verifications and timestamps the stage contains, exactly as you would inside a recipe. See Adding ingredients and steps for what each item type does.

4. Save

   The template is now available in the picker whenever you add a stage to a recipe.

You can also Duplicate an existing template as the starting point for a variant, which is usually faster than building a near-identical one from scratch.

Importing a template into a recipe

In a draft recipe version, the Add stage area offers a second button that opens the template picker. Choose a template and Crown copies the whole stage — its items, in order — into your recipe.

From there it's an ordinary stage. Edit it, reorder its items, add or remove things: none of it affects the template or any other recipe.

When a template moves on

Because importing is a copy, a recipe can fall behind the template it came from. Crown doesn't silently update it — but it does tell you.

If the template was edited after a stage was imported from it, that stage shows an amber drift badge in the recipe editor. It means: the source has changed since this copy was taken.

Drift isn't an error, and it doesn't need clearing. It's a prompt to make a decision:

• The template change matters here — update the stage by hand, or delete it and re-import.
• It doesn't — leave the stage alone. Plenty of template edits are irrelevant to a given product.

What's next

Templates are made of the same item types as any other stage. See Adding ingredients and steps for the full set.