When a Recipe Changes: Update Every Shopify Food Label That Uses It

The email from your mill says the spelt flour now comes from a facility that also handles sesame. Or the chocolate supplier switched to a recipe with milk powder. Either way, every product in your shop that uses that ingredient now has a label that is out of date, and in the EU an allergen missing from a label is the kind of mistake that leads to recalls.

The hard part is rarely writing the new text. It is finding every label that uses the old one, changing each of them without breaking anything, and being able to show later what each label said and when it changed. This guide walks through that workflow with three Pro features of Etiketto: the ingredient library, restoring a previous published version and the label evidence log.

Step 0: Keep ingredients in a library before you need it

Everything below works best if your recurring ingredients are kept once, in the Ingredients page of Etiketto: EU Nutrition Labels, instead of being retyped on each label.

1. Go to Ingredients and click Add ingredient.
2. Enter a Name you will recognise, such as “Spelt flour (mill A)”. Shoppers never see it, so it can include the supplier.
3. Enter the Text on the label exactly as it should appear in the ingredients list, with allergens between asterisks: *spelt* flour.
4. Select the allergens the ingredient contains and click Save.

Then, in a product’s label editor, under Ingredients, pick it in From the ingredient library and click Insert. The text is added at the end of the ingredients list and its allergens are selected on the label. Save the label, and the ingredient’s Labels column on the Ingredients page counts it.

Labels you wrote before the library existed count too. A label “uses” an ingredient when its ingredients list contains the ingredient’s text; upper and lower case and extra spaces do not matter. So adding your ten most common ingredients to the library today immediately links them to the labels that already contain them.

The library holds up to 500 ingredients.

Step 1: Change the ingredient once

When the supplier’s change arrives:

1. On Ingredients, click Edit on the ingredient.
2. Change its text or its allergens. For the sesame example, you would add sesame to the allergens, and if your labels state cross-contamination in the ingredient wording, update the text too.
3. Click Save. The dialog tells you how many labels use it.

That number is your to-do list. Nothing on your storefront has changed yet.

This is deliberate. Changing the library never changes a label by itself. A product may use the same flour but already carry a “may contain sesame” statement, or the change may only apply to a new batch. You decide label by label.

Step 2: Review each label that uses it

The labels that use the changed ingredient appear under Labels to review. Open one. The editor shows the label’s current text next to the library’s new text, and you choose:

• Use new text swaps the new wording into the ingredients list. Check the allergens, then save the label.
• Keep this label’s text leaves the label as it is and takes it off the review list.

Work through the list until it is empty. If a label’s ingredients list was edited by hand after it took the ingredient, you may see “The old text is no longer in the ingredients list.” In that case edit the list by hand, save, and click Keep this label’s text.

Save is not publish

Saving a label keeps your changes as a draft that customers do not see. They keep seeing the published label until you click Publish and show on store (or Publish as revision N for a label that was published before). That gives you room to review a batch of labels, ask a colleague to check them, and publish when the new stock actually reaches the shelf, so the label online matches the product a customer receives.

When you publish, the confirmation has an optional field, Source of this information. Use it: “Supplier notice of 3 November, spelt flour now may contain sesame” is exactly the note you will want to find later. Publishing records your decision; it does not certify the label.

Step 3: If you published too early, roll back

Sometimes the new label goes live a few days before the new stock does. Or the supplier corrects their notice. For that, the label editor has Restore previous published version.

1. Go to Food labels and open the product with Edit.
2. Click Restore previous published version.
3. Review the comparison. It shows Live now, what customers see today, and After restoring.
4. Click Restore revision N to confirm.

You see “Previous version restored”. The label that was live is not lost: it becomes the previous version, so restoring again undoes the rollback. Your draft, if you have one, is not changed. If the editor has unsaved changes, it asks you to save or discard them first.

Restoring brings back the previous published version only. For anything older, use the evidence log below to see what it said and re-enter it.

Step 4: Keep the record

After a recipe change, the question you may get months later is not “what does the label say now” but “what did it say on the day this customer bought it”. The Label evidence log answers that.

Every time a label is published, restored or removed, Etiketto records the time, the staff member and the label exactly as it was published. To look one up:

1. Open the product with Edit. For a variant’s own label, pick the variant first.
2. In Label evidence log, choose the Day.
3. Click Look up. You see what was live at the start of that day, who published it and when, and any changes during the day.
4. Click Download CSV to keep a copy. The file is named eu-food-labels-evidence-<product>-<day>.csv.

A few details matter:

• Recording runs for every store, whatever its plan, so the history is already there on the day you upgrade to look it up. It starts with the first publish after the feature went live.
• Saving a draft is not recorded. Only what your storefront showed is.
• Days and times follow your store’s time zone in Shopify Settings > General.
• The log is deleted with your store’s data 48 hours after you uninstall the app, so download what you need first.

For a recipe change, downloading the CSV for the day before and the day after you published gives you a simple file pair to store with the supplier’s notice.

The whole routine on one page

1. Supplier notice arrives. Edit the ingredient in the library and save. Note how many labels use it.
2. Open Labels to review. For each label: Use new text or Keep this label’s text, then save.
3. Publish the updated labels when the new stock is what you ship.
4. Published too early? Restore previous published version, then publish again later.
5. Download evidence CSVs around the publish date and file them with the supplier notice.

The library does not decide anything for you, and that is the point: it finds the labels, shows you the difference and leaves the call to the person who knows the product. If you also print shelf labels, remember to print fresh ones after you publish. The Etiketto app page lists what Pro adds to the free label editor.