Feature Request: Internal Name field for Items & Modifiers

[nick]

Hello Toasters,

This is primarily a feature request, but curious if any other brands are looking for this as well. We desperately need an internal name field for menu items, mainly modifiers. We have individual modifiers that have the same name but are not identical regarding their respective recipes.

For example, the modifier Extra Chicken has different portions depending on which menu item it's being used with, Taco (4oz) or Burrito (8oz). In order for our inventory software, Restaurant365, to track depletion properly, we must have a unique Extra Chicken modifier to map to the Taco recipe, and another unique Extra Chicken modifier to map to the Burrito recipe.

Now in Restaurant365, when these modifiers are imported into the system, they're both named Extra Chicken with no way of differentiating the two. The only solution would be to rename the POS modifiers to something like Extra Chicken - Taco & Extra Chicken - Burrito, but this is not ideal as the name will display on guest receipts. This can get very messy, especially when a modifier such as No Cheese can have 5+ different portions depending on which menu item it's being used on.

Another problem with having multiple modifiers named the same thing occurs when dealing with our POS Items database. Ex. Say I create a new Burrito menu item. I try to add the Extra Chicken modifier with the correct portion for Burritos, but I'm faced with a list of modifiers all with the same Extra Chicken name. I then have to click through each of my Extra Chicken modifiers in the list to see which one is applied to other Burritos in order to determine which Extra Chicken modifier I should be adding to the new Burrito menu item.

If there were an internal name field, or even a guest facing name field, we could name our modifiers as specifically as we need to without cluttering up what the guest sees on their receipt. Currently there are only 3 name fields: Name, POS Name, Kitchen Name. A 4th name field would solve many pain points for us and make menu management a lot easier.

Wondering whether I'm alone in this struggle or not and if Toast will be implementing this in the near future.

Cheers,

Nick

[mercimarketnyc]

Changing the kitchen names could be an option, but then our kitchen might get confused if the same "item" prints in different ways (bread_breakfast, bread_lunch, etc.). We just started using the kitchen names to have shortened chits to save on ink as well. I hope this feature becomes a thing soon. It is much needed by admins for menu management.

[Sdaniel]

I've had this same request as well. We also use R365, and our workaround has been to create multiple modifiers for the same ingredient, with the portion size included in the modifier name. While it gets the job done when it comes to mapping in R365, it's not the most visually appealing solution for guests when placing an online order. 

I do know that R365 has a beta for POS ingestion mapping: 

Previously, R365 ingested POS items and merged them based on name alone. This means if multiple POS items share the same name (for example, No Cheese), R365 merged them into a single POS item in R365. It did not consider that identically named POS items may belong to different dishes or represent different ingredients or portions. This led to inaccuracies in mapping and depletion tracking, particularly when items that appear the same name are actually used in different Item contexts.