Bill of materials
Also called BOM, Recipe, Formulation
The full list of what goes into one unit — every ingredient and every piece of packaging, with quantities.
A bill of materials answers “what do I need to buy to make this”. For a manufactured consumer product it has two halves that behave very differently. The formulation — the ingredients — is usually expressed per unit of volume or weight, so it scales with batch size. The packaging is per unit of product, so it scales with unit count.
Keeping the formulation volume-independent is what makes it portable. A recipe written as grams per litre stays true whether you make two litres in a kitchen or two hundred barrels in a factory. A recipe written as “18 kg of concentrate” is true only for the batch size it was written for, and is the reason scale-ups go wrong.
The bill of materials is also what turns a production plan into a purchase order. Once you know what is booked, the quantities fall out of it — which is the entire point of writing it down properly.
NextBatch keeps this straight for you. Cost per unit, tolling tiers, yield and traceability all derive from the same plan you and your co-manufacturer share — so none of it is a number somebody typed twice.
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