New Release | RME: Alternate Ingredient Promotion API & Replace in Recipes Status Page | 11 Nov 2026 – Fourth & HotSchedules Customer Success Portal

What’s New?

API Request to Promote Alternate Ingredient to Parent - A new endpoint lets you promote an alternate ingredient to become the parent of its parent/alternate group, with the current parent demoted to an alternate. The new parent takes on the previous parent’s nutrition, intolerances, ingredient list, ABV and parent-only categories. Recipe and portion costs are recalculated automatically. This requires the “switch parent/alternate ingredient” setting, which you can enable by contacting Fourth Support. It is not supported for businesses with 'restrict ingredient access by vendor' enabled.
Replace in Recipes Request Status Page Enhanced - The Replace in Recipes Request Status page now includes a Scheduled Run Date column for tasks scheduled for a future date rather than run immediately. The page also now shows up to 35 records. This is enabled by default, with no action needed.

Use the links above to find out more about this functionality.

Release date: 11th November 2026

API Request to Promote Alternate Ingredient to Parent

Enabled by default? - N
Set up by customer admin? - N
Enable via support ticket? - Y
Affects configuration or data? - N
Roles affected: If applicable

A new endpoint allows the promotion of an existing alternate ingredient to become the parent of its parent/alternate group. The current parent is demoted to an alternate within the same group.

On promotion, the new parent takes on the previous parent's values for:

Nutrition
Intolerances
Ingredient list
ABV
Parent-only categories such as cost centre category

The above values are 'owned' by the parent ingredient so do not change when an alternate is promoted to be the new parent ingredient of the group.

The 'new parent' retains its own GUID, supplier and distributor details, pack size, conversions, cost price, invoice price, and any pending values for these.

Fig.1 - The 'Promote to Parent' action button on RME Alternates screen

Post-processing calculations

Recipe costs and ingredient portion costs are recalculated automatically once the request is processed.

Identifying the ingredient
Specify the alternate ingredient to promote using either:

starChefKey (Fourth’s unique identifier, shown as product ID in the UI), or
supplierName + supplierCode

Request URL:

POST /ingredientalternatepromote

Example request:

[
  {
    "supplierName": "Dairy",
    "supplierCode": "B365",
    "starChefKey": "0099431"
  }
]

Requirements

Requires the “switch parent/alternate ingredient” setting to be enabled (contact Fourth support to enable).
Not supported for businesses with “restrict ingredient access by vendor” enabled.

Error responses

Scenario	Response
Ingredient already a parent	Ingredient is not an alternate ingredient, so it cannot be promoted to parent
StarChef key provided, doesn’t exist	There is no ingredient with the provided StarChef key in StarChef
StarChef key omitted, Supplier Name/Code don’t resolve	No ingredient exists for this Supplier Name and Supplier Code combination
Setting disabled or vendor-restriction enabled	400 Bad Request Promoting an alternate ingredient to parent is not enabled

What’s New?

API Request to Promote Alternate Ingredient to Parent

Related articles