I am building a food costing database that will automatically insert prices
in costing forms in multiple tabs (for different Menu's) from a price list on
another tab. I tried using a vlookup formula inserted in "a4" referencing
cell "a1" on the costing sheet, then went to the updated prices on the
produce sheet that matched "a1" then getting the info in 3rd column and
returning that result to "A4" on the costing sheet.

here is my formula

=VLOOKUP(A247,Produce!$A$1:$C$269,3,FALSE)

The problem is that the name in "a1" has to be exactly the same and the
produce names and amount of products change weekly. Is there a way to make
the reference more or less specific so that if I have "carrot" in "a1" the
reference will just pick out "carrot" on the produce sheet and not have to
have "Carrot Jumbo peeled 50lbs (cs)" entered throughout my recipes. It would
also have to be able to recognize "baby carrot" and the same thing with
tomatoes...

I think it might be an if function, but I am better with food than with excel.

Any help would be appreciated.

Doug