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- Re: Auto-Fulfillment of items not requiring prep
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04-23-2023 02:45 PM
ISSUE: soups, salads, chips, etc. are all taken care of by the food runner but they still need to be on the expo screen. When the kitchen fulfills all food items, the order does not go to the front of the KDS because the sauces are showing up as not fulfilled. Sometimes our KDS is 4 screens back so it is not feasible for the food runner to manually fulfill these items.
SOLUTION: How do I get these items to be marked as completed automatically when they are rang in?
Solved! Go to Solution.
4 weeks ago
I shared this feedback with the team, and this was their reply
Yes—it’s possible to stop “no-prep” items from blocking the kitchen, but it’s not typically done via “auto-fulfillment.” The clean Toast-native pattern is to route those items so they don’t land on prep-station KDS queues in the first place.
Best-practice fix: route no-prep items to Expediter only
Toast prep stations have a specific mode for exactly this use case:
• Expediter only= item skips prep stations and goes straight to expo
(recommended for things like bottled drinks, pre-packaged sauces—same idea as chips, soups that aren’t cooked-to-order, runner-only items)
That way:
- kitchen stations aren’t blocked waiting on runners
- expo/runner can still see the item on the expediter screen/ticket
Alternate options (depending on your workflow)
- If you truly want these items off KDS entirely: you can remove their prep station assignment so they don’t route to kitchen devices (but you’ll want to make sure they still show where runners need them—often expo).
- If runners need to “mark delivered” separately: Two-level fulfillment + Runner Fulfillment can help runners mark items as delivered on the KDS, but it’s still manual (not auto-fulfill).
Robert Anderson, Community Manager
Toast
3 weeks ago
Thanks for taking the time to post Rob, but unfortunately this is not the "fix" we are looking for here, it just reiterates the issue we are running into... needing items to be manually fulfilled.
There should be a selection in the "print to [expeditor/prep station]" settings that is simply 'DISPLAY at Expeditor' that doesn't require fulfillment at all. A step between "NO PRINT" and "PRINT HERE". That would be a true fix.
When the expeditor screen can scroll back 5 "pages", servers do not scroll through them all to manually fulfill the simple items on each ticket (like sides of ranch). So, when the cook line fulfills their side on their prep station, often not entirely in the order they came in at, the ticket will send to expeditor but will not hop to the front of the screen or turn green to show it is ready. This makes servers miss when their order is truly up and ready to take out, especially if their order isn't one that very first "page".
3 weeks ago
Thank you for clarifying. We need a way for items who are fullfied by the expo to move to the front of the screen so they realize they have to switch tasks of expediting tickets to assembling a dish. If its busy, the ticket will remain at the end of the list tickets which could cause it to not be seen and go unfulfilled.
We currently route the dishes to our salad station who knows to bump them immediately so they go to the front of the expo screen. Its a clunky fix but it works for now. We grew accustomed to this feature when we used Aloha. Toast is 10X better than Aloha but this continues to be a feature request from our group.
