Dietary substitutions let you automatically adjust meals for clients with specific dietary needs. The system flags or swaps meals on delivery reports so kitchen staff and drivers know what to prepare.
Substitutions are more commonly referred to as Dietary Needs in other modules of the software.
How Substitutions Work
The substitution system connects three things:
Client dietary needs — Each client can have one or more dietary needs on their profile (e.g., Vegetarian, Gluten-Free, No Beef).
Substitution rules — A dietary need is linked to an action at the level set by your mode: on the day (dietary-needs-by-day mode), on the meal (meals mode), or on the dish (meals-with-dishes mode).
Automatic matching — When a day, meal, or dish triggers a client's dietary need, the system takes the configured action.
Two Substitution Actions
Each rule uses one of two actions:
Alert / Omit Item
The dietary need is flagged on delivery reports (Kitchen Sheet, Route Sheet, Meal Labels). Kitchen staff sees the alert and manually adjusts the client's meal. This is the most common option.
Substitute Meal
The client's product for the day is swapped to the designated substitution meal for that product category — a complete meal replacement rather than a flagged adjustment.
Most organizations use Alert / Omit Item for most or all dietary needs. Substitute Meal works well for organizations with choice meals configured as products (e.g., a "Vegetarian Meal" product alongside a "Regular Meal" product) or a designated bland diet.
Setting Up Substitutions
Create dietary need types — open the Dietary Needs tab in Menus (these can also be managed in the Administration section) and add the types your organization tracks.
Add substitution rules — link each dietary need to an action at the level your mode uses (day, meal, or dish). See Managing Ingredients, Dishes & Meals .
Designate substitution meals — in Product Calendaring Setup , set each product's Substitution Meal , used when a Substitute Meal action is triggered.
Enable automatic substitutions — in Menu Management Settings , set Enable automatic meal/product substitutions to Yes .
When adding or editing a dietary need, the Advanced Settings section lets you set a text color and turn on highlight. This is optional and simply makes the dietary need stand out visually on screens and reports.
Substitutions on Reports
Substitutions appear on several reports:
Dietary Needs Report — shows the dietary needs in play for the day and the clients affected. See Menu Reports .
Delivery day reports (Kitchen Sheet, Route Sheet, Meal Labels) — when generating these from the Deliveries page, select the automatic substitutions option to see dietary needs filtered for the actual menu items being served that day.
Using automatic substitutions on reports gives kitchen staff a cleaner view — they only see dietary alerts relevant to that day's menu, not every dietary need a client has.