Recipes help when learning how to cook. They allow a dish to be replicated -- customers know what to expect when ordering their favorite burger or Italian dish or cheesecake from a favorite restaurant. This increases sales for restaurants because customers know what to expect. Using a recipe can reduce the number of errors in the kitchen, aid in determining how much of the ingredients to order/buy. They allow a cook to scale the size of the cooking batch up or down depending on how many people the cook expect to serve. Using recipes speeds up the flow of work in commercial kitchens after employees learn how to do certain steps.