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 Prodexa for production management.
Buy the Predictor
One-off payment — no subscription, ever.
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