Every item in Gaia is entered in one unit but used in many: measured out in recipes, counted in servings, ordered by the case, and tracked in inventory. Units, conversions, and packaging are what let a single item move between all of those without you re-entering it each time. Everything below is managed on the Units tab of the item page.

If you just need to get an item set up or unstuck, here's the short version.

Reliable setup order: confirm the base measurement, add a weight-to-volume conversion, add custom conversions, build packaging from the smallest unit up, set the shopping measurement, then Save. Gaia checks the whole set together and saves it in one step, so a change that would break something is caught before it's saved, not after.

Something's broken? If you see "No conversion path found," or a change won't save, jump to Fixing conversion problems at the bottom.

The rest of this article is for when you want to understand what each piece actually does, and why Gaia asks for it. You don't need all of this to set up a simple item, but it's here when a projection looks off, a price reads wrong, or you're building something more involved than "1 each."

One idea ties the whole tab together, and once you have it the rest falls into place: Gaia can use a unit for an item only if it can trace a path, through your conversions, from that unit back to the item's base measurement. A cup connects to grams, grams to a bottle, a bottle to a case. As long as there's an unbroken path back to the base, the unit works everywhere: recipes, orders, inventory, reports. When the path is broken, you get "No conversion path found." Almost everything below is really about keeping that path intact.

The base measurement is the item's home unit: an amount and a unit together, like 100 grams or 1 each. It's usually the amount printed on the item's label, or 100 grams if you don't have a label handy, and it's required for every item because it's the anchor everything else is measured against.

Two things hang off it. First, nutrition is entered against the base amount, so when the label needs to show nutrition in a different unit, Gaia rescales from the base instead of asking you to re-enter anything. Second, every other unit on the item has to be able to reach the base through your conversions; that's the path from the idea above. Confirm the base measurement first, because changing it shifts the ground under every conversion, price, and nutrition figure on the item.

A conversion is a single link between two units, like "1 tablespoon = 15 grams." String enough of them together and one item entered in grams can be measured in cups in one recipe, counted as "each" in another, ordered by the case, and depleted correctly from inventory, all from one record. There are two kinds, and they exist for different reasons.

Conversions matter so much because they're shared by every part of the item's life. The same link that lets a recipe use tablespoons is the one that lets inventory deplete the right number of grams and an order translate a case back into servings. Get one wrong and the error tends to surface somewhere far away, in a production record or an inventory read, which is why Gaia checks the whole set together when you save (see Fixing conversion problems).

Serving and nutrition units (labeled Measurements in earlier versions) are the units you want available for serving sizes and the nutrition facts label. Under the hood they're the same kind of conversion as everything else; this section just gathers the ones that add a meaningful serving amount rather than a weight-to-volume bridge, an "each" unit, or vendor packaging.

Adding a unit here makes it available as a serving or label unit, but it doesn't by itself change what the label shows. The nutrition facts display in whichever unit you pick as the item's display unit on the Nutrition Sheet. So it's really two steps: add the unit here so it can be chosen, then choose it on the Nutrition Sheet if you want the label to read in it. For example, a canned bean item entered in 100 grams won't show its label in ounces until ounces exists as a serving and nutrition unit and is selected as the display unit.

Vendor packaging is how you describe the way an item arrives from a vendor: the bottle, the case, the crate. It's also the unit inventory is tracked in. One idea underlies the whole section.

A packaging unit is just a conversion that says "1 of this contains so many of that." A "Case" isn't a special kind of object in Gaia; it's an ordinary unit, and the packaging row beside it records how many of the next-smallest unit fit inside one of it. In the editor you'll see the word Contains between the two.

So you don't describe a case of vinegar all at once. You build a short chain, and each row points only at the unit one step below it:

Notice that no row mentions grams. Gaia gets from a crate all the way down to grams by following the chain (1 Crate is 10 Cases is 60 Bottles, and so on), so you never enter or store "1 crate = 60 bottles." You describe each layer once and Gaia does the math between them. That's also why a wrong number in the middle of the chain throws off everything stacked above it.

Every packaging row has the same three parts: the packaging unit (Case), the amount it Contains (6), and the unit it contains (Bottle). That middle number is the pack size.

A full setup, smallest unit up:

A few things worth knowing about how packaging behaves:

The shopping measurement is the unit you buy, order, and forecast the item in. You set it from a conversion row's menu on the Units tab by choosing Shopping measurement; the row that's currently set shows a shopping-cart icon, so you can see at a glance which unit it is.

Its main job is to translate between how the item arrives and how it's used. Vendors ship cases and crates, but recipes and production records are in servings, so Gaia uses this conversion to move between the two. It drives the quantities on orders, how on-hand stock is shown, and the reconciliation on an item's projected inventory timeline. For an individually wrapped item the shopping measurement is usually the same as the base unit (for example, 1 each = 57 grams); for a bulk ingredient like rice it might be cups, pounds, or a container. If a projection looks wrong, an incorrect shopping-to-serving conversion is one of the most common causes. See Reading the Projected Inventory Timeline.

It's also the denominator for a vendor product's per-unit price. On each vendor product, Gaia works out how many shopping-measurement units are in the pack and shows both figures. For a case of 6 bottles priced at $24.00, with the shopping measurement set to bottle, the product reads "6 servings" and "$4.00 ea" (that's $24.00 divided by 6). Change the shopping measurement and that per-unit price changes with it, because you've changed what the price is being divided by. This is usually where a "the price per unit on this product looks wrong" question comes from.

One distinction is worth keeping straight, because it's a common mix-up: two different prices show up in two different places, driven by two different settings. The per-unit price on a vendor product uses the shopping measurement, as above. The item's own calculated price per unit, and the nutrition facts label, use the separate display unit you pick on the Nutrition Sheet. They're often the same unit, but they're set in different places, and setting one does not set the other.

Units, conversions, and packaging all live on the Units tab of the item page, organized into three sections: Serving & nutrition units, Vendor packaging, and Conversions. A reliable order to follow:

When you're done, click Save. Gaia checks the whole set of units and conversions together and saves them in one step, rather than one row at a time. Two things follow from that. A unit you just typed becomes available in other rows only after you save, and you'll see a short reminder when that applies. And if a change would break something that depends on a unit, the whole save is held back and a panel explains what's affected and how to fix it, so you're never left with a half-applied setup.

Most unit problems come down to a missing link between two units, or a change that would strand something that was relying on a unit. Gaia tries to catch both before they reach a production record or an inventory read.

"No conversion path found." A recipe or production record sometimes shows a No conversion path found error, often between two units such as tablespoon and gram. It means the item doesn't have a conversion linking the two units being used. Open the item, go to the Units tab, add the missing conversion (for example, 1 tablespoon = 15 grams), and save. Gaia now blocks many of these mismatches when items are first entered, but items created earlier may still need a conversion added.

When a change is blocked. If you try to remove or change a unit that other things depend on, Gaia shows a panel listing exactly what's affected and how to fix it, instead of failing quietly. Depending on what relies on the unit, you can:

Gaia also checks the item's existing setup when you open the Units tab, so a setup that was already broken (from older data or a deleted unit) shows its problems right away instead of surfacing later.

Removing a conversion. Deleting a saved conversion no longer makes it vanish. It stays in place, dimmed, with a "Removing when you save" chip and an Undo, and is only removed once you save. That way, if the removal would break something, the panel can point at a row you can still see and restore, rather than one that's already gone.