Launch day, eight versions of one menu
The new spring menu launches on Tuesday. On Wednesday the reports start coming in. One site still has last season's risotto on the till because the button was never removed. Another has the new burger priced at the old price. Two sites have the new dessert on Deliveroo but not on the till. At the flagship, the chefs are plating the new salad from the tasting-day photo because the recipe spec card never arrived.
The development chef and the ops team spend the rest of the week ringing round, fixing things one by one. By the time every site is right, someone has already asked for a tweak to two dishes, and the cycle starts again.
One change, many places to make it
A single dish change in a group is not one edit. It is a list of edits across systems that do not talk to each other, often done by different people.
| Where the menu lives | Who usually updates it | What goes wrong |
|---|---|---|
| EPOS at each site | Ops or the EPOS provider | Buttons missed, old prices, wrong course |
| Delivery platforms | Marketing or site managers | Items live that the kitchen cannot make |
| Website and printed menus | Marketing and printers | Descriptions out of step with the dish |
| Recipe specs and allergens | Development chef | Specs sent by email, not filed |
| Supplier ordering | Purchasing | New ingredients not set up at every site |
Where the EPOS is centrally managed, part of this is easier, but prices often vary by site tier, some sites run a reduced menu, and delivery menus differ from dine-in. Those variations are exactly where the mistakes happen.
What an uneven rollout costs
Wrong prices on the till mean lost margin until someone notices, or guests charged differently at two sites for the same dish. Items on delivery platforms that the kitchen cannot make lead to cancelled orders and poor ratings. Chefs cooking without the spec produce a different dish at each site, which is the thing a group brand is supposed to prevent. And allergen information that lags behind the recipe is a risk the group takes seriously for good reason.
Then there is time. Development chefs and ops managers spend launch week firefighting instead of visiting sites to check the food.
How we give the menu one home
- We build a menu record for each dish: name, descriptions for each channel, price by site tier, course, modifiers, recipe, ingredients and the allergen information your team maintains.
- Each site is assigned a menu profile, such as full, reduced or delivery only, so variations are set once instead of remembered.
- A menu change is drafted, reviewed and given a go-live date. Nothing reaches a site until it is approved.
- On the go-live date, changes are pushed to each EPOS through its API or as a prepared import file for the provider, and to delivery platforms where they support menu integration.
- Recipe specs, with photos and plating notes, are published to a kitchen screen or tablet at each site, and the old version is withdrawn.
- Each site gets a launch checklist: till checked, specs read, new ingredients ordered, delivery menu checked. Head office sees which sites have signed off.
Where a system cannot be updated automatically, the tool produces the exact list of changes for that system so the person doing it is not working from memory.
A launch week that looks different
The development chef writes the dish once. Ops sets which sites get it and at what price tier. On launch morning, every site has the same buttons, the same specs and the same delivery menu, and the few sites that have not ticked their checklist are visible by lunchtime. When a tweak comes a week later, it goes through the same route and reaches every site together.
Over time, the menu record becomes the history: which dishes ran when, at which price, at which sites. That is useful for the next menu planning session.
Is this your menu launch?
- Every launch is followed by days of fixing tills site by site.
- Prices for the same dish differ between sites by accident.
- Delivery menus lag behind the restaurant menu.
- Recipe specs go out by email and nobody knows who has read them.
- Allergen information is updated separately from the recipe.