Food settings: platform menus, ordering links and order push

Select Food in the left-hand menu, then Settings. Three things live here, and all of them concern the ordering platforms your tribes trade on rather than your own menus: keeping Gorilla Dash's copy of a platform menu current, deciding where the Order button on your brand website sends a customer, and deciding what happens to an accepted order.

Platform menus

The platform mapping screens work against a mirror — Gorilla Dash's own copy of what each platform currently has on its menu. Without that copy there is nothing on the platform side of the mapping screen to point at, which is why a tribe that has just been connected shows nothing to map.

The Platform menus card lists every platform connected to a tribe in your organisation, with how many of its locations have been mirrored and how recently. "No menu has been mirrored yet" means exactly that, and Pull menus is the remedy.

Select Pull menus.
Choose the Platform.
Choose the Locations you want. Leave the box empty to pull every location.
Select Pull now.

One job runs per location, in the background, so nothing appears instantly. The mapping list fills in as the menus land, and a large network pulling every location will take a while — start it and come back rather than watching it.

ONLY MENUS THE PUBLIC CAN ORDER FROM ARE MIRRORED

A menu the platform holds but does not expose to online ordering or to ordering partners is not pulled. If a menu you expected is missing after a pull, check its visibility in the platform itself before assuming the pull failed. Platforms marked "mirrored outside Gorilla Dash" get their copy by another route and cannot be pulled from here.

Pull menus again whenever a platform menu has changed — new items, renamed items, a seasonal range. Until you do, the mapping screens are working from the old menu and the new items will not appear to map.

Online ordering link

If your brand has a website built in Gorilla Dash, each menu listing on it can carry an Order button that opens the same product on the ordering page of whichever tribe the visitor has chosen. The Online ordering link card is where that is switched on. You are not asked for any addresses: Gorilla Dash works the link out for every listing at every tribe from the platform mapping and from each tribe's own mirrored Toast menu.

The reason it is worked out rather than typed in is that every restaurant enters its own menu into Toast, so the same product carries a different identifier at each of them, and a franchisee who renames it changes the address too. Keeping a finished address per product per tribe would mean maintaining thousands of them by hand, and every rename in Toast would quietly break one.

Set Ordering platform to Toast. Leaving it empty is how you turn the generated Order buttons off: with no platform chosen, no listing gets a link built for it and the website shows no button. A listing with its own External Order URL typed in is not affected, because that address is used as written and never consults this setting. Toast is the only platform Gorilla Dash can build a link for at the moment; the rest are listed as coming soon and cannot be picked.
If your brand takes its online orders on its own web address rather than on Toast's, enter that address in Ordering site address, up to but not including the restaurant. Leave it blank and Toast's own ordering site is used.
Select Save.

Every link also needs the restaurant's own slug — the short name that identifies that restaurant in the ordering address. Gorilla Dash gets it in one of two ways. Pulling a tribe's Toast menu records the slug Toast publishes for it, which is enough on Toast's own ordering site and needs nothing from you. The other way is to type it yourself, into a content item named Toast Slug on the tribe. A typed slug always wins over the one read from Toast, so it is also how you correct a tribe whose slug came through wrong or whose Toast profile cannot be read.

Your own ordering address needs a typed Toast Slug for every tribe

The slug read from Toast is the one Toast's own ordering site uses, and nothing guarantees your web address routes on the same name — the restaurants seen so far use a different slug on each. So when an Ordering site address is set, a tribe gets a link only from a slug somebody has typed into its Toast Slug content. Guessing would put a missing page behind the Order button, which is worse than no button at all, so Gorilla Dash returns no link instead.

Beneath the two fields is a preview, so you can check a tribe without waiting for the website. Under Preview for a tribe, choose a Tribe and a Listing. Gorilla Dash shows either the address the website will link to, which you can select to open, or a note that this tribe gets no Order link for this listing together with the reason. When a link is shown, a line underneath says whether the slug it used was typed into the tribe's Toast Slug content or read from Toast when the menu was pulled.

These are the reasons the preview gives, and what each one needs:

What the preview says	What to do
No ordering platform is chosen	Set Ordering platform to Toast and save.
This tribe has no Toast restaurant slug	Pull its Toast menu with Pull menus above, or type the slug into the tribe's Toast Slug content.
A custom ordering site needs the tribe's Toast Slug content	Type the slug this tribe orders under on your own web address into its Toast Slug content. The slug read from Toast is not used here.
This listing offers a choice of menu items	Nothing. A combo listing holds several menu items, so there is no single Toast product for it to open, and it never gets a link.
The menu item is not mapped to Toast, or this tribe's Toast menu does not carry any of the mapped items	Map the menu item on Platform mapping, and pull this tribe's Toast menu so Gorilla Dash can see what it sells. A menu loaded by manual upload does not count here, even though the mapping screens list it: only a menu pulled from Toast names a page Toast can actually open.
This tribe's Toast menu carries the mapped item, but Toast does not list it for online ordering	The tribe's Toast menu carries the item but hides it from online ordering. Show it in Toast, and it links after the next menu pull.
This listing's own External Order URL could not be used for this tribe	Check the address typed on the listing, or clear it so the generated link is used instead.

That last reason is the one exception to all of this. A listing with something typed in its External Order URL is left alone: that address is used as it is typed, with its placeholders filled in for the chosen tribe, and the generated link is never consulted. It can still come back with no link of its own, which is what the last row of the table above is for. Clear the field to put the listing back on the generated link. Keep it for the occasional product that orders somewhere else, rather than as the usual way of linking a menu.

PULL THE MENUS FIRST

A tribe that has never had its Toast menu pulled has nothing for a link to be built from, so the preview will say so for every listing at that tribe. Pull menus, above, is the remedy, and the nightly pull keeps each tribe current afterwards. An item renamed in Toast is corrected by the next pull without anyone touching the menu.

Order push

When a catering order is placed on ezCater, somebody has to enter it into the tribe's point of sale before the kitchen can act on it. Order push does that automatically: once the order is accepted, it is written into Toast for you.

The Order push card sets the rule. There is one organisation default, and any tribe can be given its own rule instead.

Setting	What it decides
Push	On or off. Off means accepted orders are not written into the point of sale and somebody enters them by hand, as before.
Before the event	How long before the event the order is written. The default is two hours, and it can be set up to a week.
On cancel	What happens if the customer cancels after the order has already been pushed: Email the tribe, so somebody voids it themselves, or Void automatically.

The reason for a lead time rather than pushing immediately is that a Toast order cannot be edited once it is written. Holding the order until shortly before the event means a customer who changes their mind, or adds to the order, is still handled by ezCater rather than leaving a wrong order sitting in the kitchen system. Set the lead time to however long your tribes need to prepare, and no longer.

Voiding automatically is not available on every connection

Voiding a Toast order needs a permission that not every Toast connection grants. Where it has not been granted, a cancellation falls back to emailing the tribe so a person can void it, whatever the setting says. A cancellation that arrives before the push simply means nothing is ever written, and needs no action at all.

Giving a tribe its own rule

The table beneath the default lists every tribe connected to either platform, with the connection it has on each side, whether it follows the organisation default or has a rule of its own, and what that rule is.

To change one tribe, select the pencil on its row.
To change several, select them and use Edit selected.
In the dialog, turn Use the organisation default off to set the tribe's own rule, or on to send it back to following the default.

The same rule can be set from the tribe's own side, under Sales then Settings, which is where a tribe user would find it. Both screens are editing the same setting.

A tribe needs a live connection on both sides before any of this happens — an ezCater connection to receive the order and a Toast connection to write it into. The connection chips on each row are the quickest way to see which tribes are not ready.