The Tuesday afternoon menu job
The chicken supplier has put prices up, so you decide to add a bit to the wings and drop the half-portion that never sells. It sounds like five minutes. Then you log into the Deliveroo partner hub, find the item, change the price, find the meal deal that includes it, change that, and save. Then Uber Eats, where the menu is structured slightly differently and the meal deal is a separate category. Then Just Eat, where you have to raise a request or use a different screen. Then your own ordering website. Then the till.
An hour later you think you are done. On Friday a customer complains that the wings were a different price on Uber Eats, and you find the half-portion is still on Just Eat because it was hidden in a combo you forgot existed.
Why the menus drift
Each app has its own menu builder with its own ideas about categories, modifiers, combos and photos. A modifier group on one app, such as a choice of sauce, might be a set of separate options on another. So there is no single copy of your menu. There are five copies, each slightly reshaped to fit its platform, and each edited by hand.
Nobody owns the full picture. The person who set up Uber Eats may have left. The website was built by a nephew. The till was programmed by the till company. Every change relies on someone remembering every place the item appears, including combos, meal deals and upsells, and that memory is exactly what fails.
Seasonal specials make it worse. Something added for a fortnight is often never removed from one of the channels, so customers keep ordering a dish the kitchen no longer has the ingredients for.
Where a drifting menu costs you
| Symptom | The knock-on effect |
|---|---|
| Different prices by app | Complaints, and margin lost where the old price stuck |
| Dead items still listed | Orders for dishes you cannot make, then refunds |
| Wrong modifiers | Customers choosing options the kitchen does not offer |
| Missing photos or descriptions | Weaker listings on the app where they were skipped |
| Allergen text out of date | The description on one channel no longer matches the recipe |
Then there is the time. Menu edits get done late at night or pushed back, so price rises you meant to make in March happen in May, and the margin in between is simply gone. On the allergen point, your own procedures and adviser decide what you must publish. Our part is making sure the text you approve is the same everywhere.
One master menu, published everywhere
We build a master menu that you edit in one place, with the structure each channel needs worked out behind the scenes.
- We import your current menus from each app and your website, match the same item across channels and show you where they already differ, so you start from a clean, agreed version.
- Each item holds its name, description, photo, modifiers, allergen text you have approved and a price per channel, because many takeaways price the apps differently from the shop.
- Combos and meal deals reference the items inside them, so removing or repricing an item flags every deal it appears in.
- When you publish, the menu is pushed to each app through its menu interface or through an aggregation service that holds the connection, and to your own site directly.
- A change log records who changed what and when, and a comparison view shows any channel where the live menu no longer matches the master.
- Specials can be given an end date, so they drop off every channel by themselves.
Not every app exposes every menu feature through its interface, and the rules change. We check what each of your channels supports and tell you honestly where a manual step remains.
Menu changes after the switch
The price rise from the chicken supplier becomes one edit. You change the wings, the tool shows you the two meal deals that contain them, you adjust those, and you press publish. A few minutes later every app and your website show the new prices, and the comparison view confirms it.
- One place to edit the menu, with every channel updated from it
- Channel pricing held as a rule rather than remembered
- Specials that remove themselves when they end
- A record of every change for when someone asks why a price moved
Does your menu live in five places?
- A price change means logging into three or more partner portals.
- Customers have spotted different prices on different apps.
- An item you stopped selling is still orderable somewhere.
- You have put off a price rise because the menu update is a chore.
- Nobody is sure which version of the menu is the right one.