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

[JustAsking]

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.

[josh212]

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 

[JustAsking]

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.

[josh212]

Set to print changes only