Getting Started with Menu Management
This guide walks you through setting up Menu Management after it has been enabled in the settings. See more information on the Menu Management settings at Setting Up Menu Management
Set up Dietary Needs
Dietary Needs are used to assign dietary preferences and restrictions to clients and map those to meals. If you have not setup your organization's Dietary Needs yet, navigate to Administration and select the Dietary Needs button. Add the dietary need types your organization tracks (e.g., Vegetarian, Gluten-Free, No Beef). For how these drive substitutions, see Dietary Substitutions .
Build your menu content
The Menu Content is configurable from the Menus section of the app. What you build here depends on the Meal Components mode you chose:
- Dietary needs by day — nothing to build here; you'll assign dietary needs directly on the calendar (step 5).
- Meals — create your Meals , then attach dietary needs and (optionally) ingredients to each meal.
- Meals with dishes — create your Ingredients and Dishes first, then build Meals from those dishes.
For step-by-step instructions, see Managing Ingredients, Dishes & Meals . In Meals with dishes mode, a dish carries its dietary needs and, optionally, ingredients (per-serving quantities, scaled automatically on reports). For example, a Banana Bread side dish:
Assign meals to the calendar
Open the Day view and use Edit day assignments (meal/dish modes) or Assign dietary needs (day mode) to set up each day. If you enabled a recurring schedule, use the Recurring Schedule tab to set the repeating template instead. See Working with the Meal Calendar .
Enable automatic substitutions (optional)
Once your dietary needs and substitution meals are set up, return to Menu Management Settings and set Enable automatic meal/product substitutions to Yes. The system will then move clients to a substitution meal when their dietary needs match.
Run reports
From the Day view you can generate the Ingredients Report and Dietary Needs Report, and you can build a scaled shopping list. See Menu Reports .