A menu item is one thing you sell — a board, a box, a drink. It exists once, at organisation level, whatever menus it is listed on. Everything that is true of the dish wherever it appears lives here; everything that depends on the menu (a special price, a different photo) lives on the menu listing instead.
Creating one
Go to Food → Menu items and click Create Menu Item. The form is in two halves.
| Field | What it is |
|---|---|
| Menu Item Name | What customers see. Required. |
| Menu Item Slug | The web address for the item, filled in from the name. Must be unique in your organisation. |
| Attributes | Dietary and other tags — Vegetarian, Gluten Free — from Menu Item Attributes. |
| Menu Item Description | The menu description. |
| Default Price | The price charged unless a menu listing or a tribe sets another. Enter dollars. |
| Servings From / To | How many people it serves, for catering menus. |
| Nutrition | Serving size (quantity and unit), energy (with its unit), and an allergy statement. |
| Square Photo | The image shown on menus and portals, with a description for accessibility. |
| Products | The products this dish is made from, with quantities — the recipe behind it. See Products and ingredients. |
| Modifiers | The modifier groups the customer chooses from when ordering this item. |
Modifiers on an item
Attach a modifier group and every customer ordering the item is asked that group's question — bread choice, add-ons, allergies. The groups themselves are built once under Menu Modifiers and reused across items, so changing the options in a group changes every item that uses it.
Grouping items into categories
A category is a label you put on menu items so you can find them again — Drinks, Catering trays, Seasonal, Gluten free. They are separate from the menus items appear on: a menu decides what a customer is offered, a category is for you, and one item can carry several.
Select Categories on the Menu Items list to manage them. Add Category creates one, and each can be renamed or deleted. Deleting a category is permanent, but it does not delete anything on the menu — the items in it stay exactly as they are and simply leave the category.
Once categories exist, the filter at the top of the Menu Items list narrows it to one of them, and the chips on each row show which categories that item carries. On a menu running to several hundred items this is the difference between finding something and scrolling for it.
To label many items at once, select them and choose Bulk Edit. Add to categories adds a label to everything selected; Remove from categories takes one away. Adding leaves items that already carry the category alone, and removing skips items that never had it, so running either twice does no harm.
Merging two menu items
The same dish sometimes ends up on the list twice — typed in by hand once, and pulled in from Toast or another ordering platform a second time. Merging folds one of them into the other, so you are left with a single item that carries everything both of them had, and the duplicate is deleted.
- Go to Food → Menu items and find the item you want to get rid of — the duplicate, not the one you are keeping.
- Click the merge icon at the end of its row (its tooltip reads Merge into another menu item). If you already have the item open, select Merge into… at the bottom of Edit Menu Item instead.
- In Merge into, choose the item to keep. Items are listed with their default price to help you tell similar names apart.
- Read the preview. It lists what moves to the item you are keeping, and under Fills fields … has left empty it shows each detail the kept item will take from the duplicate, with its value.
- If both items have an allergy statement and they say different things, the dialog shows both and asks which should be kept. The kept item's own statement is selected to start with.
- Click Merge.
Everything linked to the duplicate moves to the item you keep: the menus it is listed on and each tribe's price there, the price each tribe charges for the item itself, its platform mappings (and so the orders attributed through them), categories, attributes, modifier groups, products, coupons, online ordering cart lines, photos and translations. Where the kept item already has the same link — it is already on that menu, or already in that category, or already has its own price for that tribe — its own is kept and the duplicate's is dropped.
The details typed into the item itself follow a simple rule: the item you keep keeps every value it already has, and anything it has left empty is filled from the duplicate. That covers the description, Servings From and Servings To, the nutrition quantity and measurement unit, the energy and its unit, and the allergy statement. Details that only make sense together move together, so an energy figure always arrives with its own unit rather than landing in a unit it was not measured in.
The photo description is the one exception to that rule, because it describes one particular photo. When the duplicate's square photo moves to the item you keep, its photo description comes with it and replaces the kept item's, even if the kept item already had one; if the duplicate's photo has no description, the kept item's is cleared. When the photo does not move, because the kept item has a square photo of its own, the kept item's photo description stays as it is. The preview lists the photo description on its own line when it is going to be replaced.
The default price is never copied: the item you keep always has one, and a price of $0 is a real setting for an item priced by its platform. Menu listings that were set to use the duplicate's default price use the kept item's default price after the merge, so check those menus if the two items were priced differently. Listings with their own price keep it.
To tidy up many duplicates at once, click Smart merge above the Menu Items list. It finds groups of items that look like the same dish, suggests which one to keep (Keep this one changes it), and merges the ones you tick. Leave Price must match on to see only look-alikes with the same price. Smart merge follows the same rules as a single merge, except that when two allergy statements differ it keeps the kept item's without asking, so merge those items one at a time if you need to choose. The merge icon is not available while you are viewing the list in another language; switch back to your default language first.
Editing and deleting
Editing an item changes it everywhere it is listed. Deleting one removes it from every menu and drops any platform mapping that pointed at it, so an incoming ezCater or Toast order for that product would no longer have anything to attach to. If a dish is off for the season, take it off the menu — or let tribes disable it — rather than deleting it.