topic Re: All You Can Eat & Bottomless Menus: Growing Trend, Painful POS Workflow in Industry Trends

All You Can Eat & Bottomless Menus: Growing Trend, Painful POS Workflow

JustAsking — Sun, 04 Jan 2026 22:19:50 GMT

Demand for all-you-can-eat and bottomless drink menus (KBBQ, sushi, hot pot, brunch, etc.) is clearly increasing, but Toast doesn’t seem built for how these programs actually work.

Right now we’re forced to:

Use $0 menu items for AYCE food/drinks items
Create a separate button to charge for AYCE

This falls apart because AYCE is based on continuous ordering, not one-time ordering.

Common issues we see:

AYCE items added without charging the AYCE fee
Free food/drinks accidentally or intentionally added to non-AYCE tables
No guardrails to prevent mistakes or abuse

As AYCE and unlimited menus become more common and higher-volume, these gaps create real revenue leakage and training problems.

It would be great to see native AYCE support, such as:

Allowing continuous ordering without $0 item hacks
Preventing AYCE items from being added to non-AYCE tables

Curious if others are running into the same problems or if Toast is already exploring a solution here.

Re: All You Can Eat & Bottomless Menus: Growing Trend, Painful POS Workflow

josh212 — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 06:11:01 GMT

So it seems like the best solution would be to build a AYCE menu item and use size and sequence, or just sequence pricing for a modifier group and have all the menu items as modifiers that are included

Re: All You Can Eat & Bottomless Menus: Growing Trend, Painful POS Workflow

JustAsking — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 18:12:00 GMT

I might be understanding it wrong but if you do it by modifiers the kitchen receipts won't be smooth as you think. If a customer orders a 2nd round or 3rd using the modifier method the server would have to edit the existing item modifier causing a lot of confusion from the back.

Re: All You Can Eat & Bottomless Menus: Growing Trend, Painful POS Workflow

josh212 — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 19:45:24 GMT

Set to print changes only