Hi,

Yes, both Excel and Access can do this quite nicely. If you have a lot of data or you are more familiar with Access, then it would be worth putting it into Access. Access can return the results by using a simple query against the table.

If you're going to do it in Excel then putting each ingredient into it's own cell (rather than comma separated) would make things much easier. To return a list of associated IDs you could use the Advanced Filter (manually). If you want to automate the Advanced Filter then you would need to write some VBA code.