Also from Prodexa
Two paid tools built for chocolatiers, plus one free download: a Shelf-Life Predictor that estimates ganache water activity from a recipe, a Chocolate Science eBook, and a free reordered index of Callebaut’s Chocolatier’s Kitchen.
Windows desktop program
Type in a ganache recipe and get a considered shelf-life estimate in seconds — predicted water activity, a cautious worst case, a shelf-life category, a confidence rating and a plain-English explanation. Built for chocolatiers, by a chocolatier.
What it does
Enter each ingredient and its weight in grams. The Predictor recognises what each one is, works out the recipe’s water activity, and tells you the likely shelf-life category with a cautious margin for safety.
Explore changes
Wondering what a little more invert sugar, or a touch less cream, would do? Change an amount and the Predictor shows the new water activity and category straight away — so you can formulate towards the keeping quality you want before you ever weigh anything out.
Honest by design
The Predictor is built to be cautious and truthful. It defaults to a conservative worst case, tells you plainly when a recipe is borderline or outside its confident range, and never pretends a number is a guarantee. It is a decision aid — it does not replace laboratory water-activity testing for formal shelf-life validation. For anything you sell, confirm with a real keeping trial.
Proven against a trusted reference
We ran the Predictor across every shelf-life recipe in Callebaut’s Chocolatier’s Kitchen — more than 250 recipes the book sorts into short, medium and long keeping. None of them were used to build the program, so this was a genuine outside check against a reference the trade already trusts.
On about 93% of those recipes it agreed with the book or was more cautious than it — and it correctly flagged 52 of the 55 genuinely short-life recipes. When it disagrees it almost always says “use it sooner”, not later: exactly what you want from a safety tool.
Where it was more generous than the book, the recipes were borderline — sitting right on the line between two shelf-life bands, where a single step either way is a judgement call. What stands out is how consistently it got it right: it lined up with, or was more cautious than, a reference the trade trusts across the great bulk of the book.
It’s an independent sense-check, not a lab certificate: the program estimates a cautious shelf-life band rather than an exact number of weeks. For anything you sell, confirm with a real keeping trial.
Honest fit guide
It does specific things well. Here is a plain guide to whether it suits your situation.
Make ganache-based products — bonbons, truffles, filled chocolates, ganache bars. Work on Windows. Want a quick sanity-check estimate before committing to a recipe or starting a batch. Need to explore what a small formulation change would do to shelf life. Understand that the result is guidance, not a lab certificate.
Need formal shelf-life validation for regulatory purposes — for that you need a real laboratory test. Work primarily with non-ganache products (hard confectionery, enrobed nuts, dark bars without a ganache centre). Use a Mac or Linux machine. Need to log batches or print labels — see the Prodexa Product, Batch and Pricing Manager below for production management.
Buy the Predictor
One-off payment — no subscription, ever.
Secure checkout by Stripe. We never see or store your card details.
Digital guide
Understand the science behind tempering, ganache stability, bloom and shelf life — practical food science for chocolatiers, without the academic fog.
What’s inside
A 40+ page guide that cuts through the guesswork behind tempering, ganache stability, bloom, shelf life and more. Written for professional chocolatiers, serious hobbyists and small makers who want to solve problems with confidence.
Every penny goes to Macmillan Cancer Support.
£3
One-off payment — instant download, EPUB + PDF.
Every penny goes to Macmillan Cancer Support. Secure checkout by Stripe — your download link appears on screen and is emailed to you.
A look inside
The science is explained visually, not buried in jargon — like these two pages on tempering and on how a ganache emulsion actually forms.
Tempering by machine, step by step
How a ganache emulsion forms
Free download
A free, more useful index of the recipes in Callebaut’s Chocolatier’s Kitchen — reordered alphabetically by prime ingredient, so you can find every recipe built around a given ingredient at a glance. The book’s own index lists recipes by name; this one groups every recipe under its prime ingredient instead, A–Z, page numbers kept.
It’s the same book we used to test the Shelf-Life Predictor against more than 250 recipes.
Prodexa’s Product, Batch and Pricing Manager covers stock, costing and labels too — one Windows program, £59 once.