You can create a specific Product Recipe for each variant of a product. This article focuses on how to create variant-specific recipes. If you are unfamiliar with variants in Katana, we suggest reading what are variants and how to set up variants.

Using our variants feature together with variant-specific Product Recipe setup is more powerful than creating separate product cards and separate recipes for each variant as:

- The initial setup of variants and recipes is easier;

- Changes in recipes are faster and more convenient. If you need to replace an ingredient that is used for all product variants, you can change it with a few clicks on a single product card, rather than replacing the same ingredient for each variant separately.

If you enable variants for a product in the "General info" section of a product card, you can enter relevant Variant Options (e.g. type, size, color) and Option Values (e.g. small, large, green, blue). In the Product Recipe / BOM:

- Variant Options will appear as columns.

- Option Values will appear as possible selections in the drop-down menu for each Variant Option and each ingredient.

For example, if I enable variants for a product and insert "Color" and "Size" as Variant Options...

... then initially my Product Recipe section might look something like this (in this example, 3 ingredients are already entered to the recipe, all of which currently apply to all product variants):

However, in most cases, you probably use different ingredients for each variant (some ingredients might match, but some are probably different). To create variant-specific Product Recipes:

1. Add materials (or subassemblies) to the Product Recipe. You could start by entering all the ingredients required by all product variants and then proceed to step 2, or you could enter an ingredient and immediately assign it to specific variants.

Tip: You can also create variants for materials to use them in the Product Recipe. However, you cannot create material variants through the quick-add feature (i.e. by typing a material name to the ingredient field, selecting "Create new: [material name]" from the drop-down menu and filling in the info in the pop-up window). To create material variants, you must navigate to the material card.

2. Assign ingredients to specific variants. You can select one or more variant Option Values for each ingredient by clicking on a cell in any Variant Option column and selecting relevant Option Values from the drop-down menu. By default, an ingredient is assigned to all variants (as shown by "-all-" statuses). This means that an ingredient is included in the recipe for all the product's variants.

Continuing the above example, I have created color and size variants for some materials, entered those to the Product Recipe and then assigned those to relevant product variants. The correct Product Recipe might now look something like this:

In this example, I use shorter and longer versions of wooden handles for small and large hammers, respectively, but I use the same handles for all hammer color variants. My hammerheads are in a different color, so I need to assign each hammerhead to a specific hammer color variant (but I use the same hammerheads for both small and large hammers). My special Jack's Badge only comes with Gold and Green Large hammers.