This section covers the Menu Management module — meal planning, rotating calendars, ingredient tracking, and dietary substitutions.
Overview
The Menu Management module lets you plan meals for your clients with automated substitution tracking and ingredient scaling using a three-tier hierarchy:
Calendar — A rotating schedule that assigns meals to specific days for each product
Meals — A collection of dishes served together (e.g., an entrée, side, and dessert)
Dishes — Recipes made from one or more ingredients with quantities and measurements. A dish may be assigned to multiple meals.
Dietary Needs / Substitutions and Ingredients are assigned to Dishes, which powers the automated substitutions and ingredient scaling.
Key Features
Rotating meal calendars — Define a multi-week cycle and assign meals to each day
Ingredient scaling — Automatically calculate ingredient quantities based on client counts
Dietary substitutions — Configure automatic meal or ingredient substitutions for clients with dietary needs. Menu Management supports two types of substitutions:
Omit Item: An Omit Item substitution is simply listed on the Delivery Reports (e.g. Kitchen Sheet, Route Sheet, Meal Labels, etc. depending on your organization's report configuration) and the Kitchen staff can make the appropriate adjustment to the client's meal.
Substitute Meal: A Substitute Meal substitution changes a client's Product for the day to the designated Substitution Meal for that product category. This could be a special "Substitution Meal" product item or simply another usual product item.
Most organizations use Alert / Omit Item substitutions for most or all of the substitution types. The Substitute Meal option can work well for organizations with choice meals configured as products.
Shopping lists — Generate scaled ingredient lists for any date range
Day detail reports — View per-day breakdowns of meals, clients, and dietary overrides
Accessing Menu Management
Click Menus in the top navigation bar. The main page has three sections:
Meal Calendar — View the current month's meal assignments. Click any day to see details or edit.
Meals — Manage your meal data using the buttons: Meals, Dishes, Ingredients, and Dietary Needs.
Settings — Configure your calendar using the buttons: Edit master calendar and Calendaring settings.
Documentation
Explore the guides below to learn about each area of Menu Management:
Getting Started with Menu Management — Step-by-step setup guide for initializing the calendar, building ingredients, dishes, and meals, and configuring substitutions.