How do you convert a recipe into a formula?

[Soliloquy]

I'd like to learn more about how bakeries actually work, especially how they deal with mass-producing things. I understand they use formulas instead of recipes so that they can easily scale the amount. But how do you convert a regular recipe for home use into a formula?

 

[Bdsn]

I am just getting into cookie baking, normally I bake bread. There are a lot of books that can explain it better than I can, but basically it is all based off of your dry flour weight. 2 cups of flour weighs 250g, so 250g is your 100% A half cup of white sugar is 100g, 40% of the flour weight. Brown sugar is 110g per half cup, 44% of the flour weight. A cup of butter is 226g, 90.4%. Salt is 6g per tsp, 2.4%, 4.6g for a t of baking soda, 1.84%. Weight/volume conversion varies with things like elevation and humidity, so don't take these numbers for gospel (or the recipe, just making it up as I go).
So, in this pretend recipe, the formula would be:
100% flour
40% white sugar
44% brown sugar
90% butter
2.4% salt
1.84% baking soda

You just decide how much flour you want to use and scale the other ingredients accordingly. It makes it so much easier, I use a 2 kilogram scale for the big stuff and a smaller precision scale for things like salt, baking soda and yeast.