Seven ingredients. That’s the job.

Each ingredient, a little deeper.

Training (House Style). The persistent identity of the station. Who the business is. How it talks. What it stands for. This is the foundation. Written once, referenced on every ticket.

Context (The Ticket). The situation-specific details of this order. Customer history, job notes, the thread so far. Context tells the station which customer is standing at the counter right now.

Guardrails (Safety Stops). What the station cannot do. Prices it cannot quote. Promises it cannot make. Actions that require the Chef’s eyes. Without guardrails, the station can do anything, including things that blow up the business.

Examples (Plated Reference). Three to five real samples of what “good” looks like in your business. Not generic best practices. Your actual plates. This is the ingredient that separates generic AI output from output that sounds like you.

Format (The Plate). Describe the artifacts the station produces and the shape each one takes. A request, a reply, a memo, a log entry. The plate is the standard. The path is the station’s problem.

Escalation (The Hand-Back). The rule set for which dishes leave the station and go to a human: what triggers the hand-back, who receives it, and what travels with it. Escalation is what makes the other six ingredients safe to run.

Feedback (Taste, Then Revise). Two halves: instrumentation and revision. Track two or three metrics that map to value, then treat every miss as recipe data. Which ingredient broke? Update that ingredient, then run the next ticket against the sharper recipe.

Hit all seven and the dish holds. Skip any one and you already know the failure mode.

How it connects.

The Recipe is what you write when you move from Doing to Dispatching. The Four D’s says Dispatching is when you write the recipe. Dialing is when you refine it. The Prep List tells you which recipe to write first. Quality Control diagnoses which ingredient broke when the station drops a plate.