Managing Duplicate Menus for Dine-In & Takeout

[Isaac1]

Looking for Ideas and Solutions

Hi Toast Community!

I'm currently facing a challenge with managing two identical menus for Dine-In and Takeout, and I'd love to hear how others are handling similar setups.

To better manage dining-option-specific configurations, pricing, and accurate costing, we've created two separate menus that are essentially deep copies of each other. While the items share identical names and nearly 99% of their configurations, they are completely separate objects in the Toast backend.

The Challenge:

Whenever we update our menu, add a new item, configure modifiers, or assign modifier groups, it becomes increasingly difficult to identify which item or group belongs to which menu, especially when browsing the item database or using the "Add Item/Modifier" options within the menu editor.

Since both menus contain identical item names, modifier names, and group names, it's easy to accidentally select or assign an object from the wrong menu. This makes ongoing menu maintenance unnecessarily complicated and increases the risk of configuration errors.

I'm curious to hear:

• Has anyone experienced a similar challenge when managing duplicated menus?

• Are there any recommended workflows or workarounds to make identifying and managing these objects easier?

• Is Toast working on any features that could improve menu organization, distinguish duplicated items in the backend, or simplify managing multiple menus with similar configurations?

P.S. I'm aware that Toast assigns a unique item number to each item, which can help distinguish between otherwise identical objects. However, these numbers aren't particularly prominent or easily accessible during the menu-building and editing process, making them less practical for day-to-day management.

Ideally, we'd love a way to maintain separate dining-option-specific menus without the operational complexity of managing hundreds of nearly identical backend objects.

I'd appreciate any insights, suggestions, or feedback from fellow operators or the Toast product team.

Thanks in advance!

[rcmck]

Can I ask why you went with a deep copy rather than just copying the menu groups and keeping the items/modifiers the same?

[Isaac1]

Absolutely! The main reason is that our item-level costing differs between Dine-In and Takeout, along with some differences in item descriptions, and available modifier options.

For example, certain items are served with sauce on the side for Takeout but prepared differently for Dine-In. Some modifiers also have different costs depending on the dining option. A simple example is garlic mayo, which costs less when served in the dining room than when packaged in a soufflé container for Takeout.

While most of the menu is identical, these small differences across hundreds of items and modifiers make it important for us to maintain separate configurations and accurately track costs for each dining option.

That's ultimately why we went with a deep copy rather than sharing the same items and modifiers across both menus.

[rcmck]

Thanks, just checking, sometimes people use deep copy incorrectly, in this case you don't have much choice. I don't have much to offer in managing it, In the few cases where I do have duplicate modifier groups or items I just try to add something to the name field which isn't great because the customer sees it.

There have been several requests for another name field for similar reasons. https://community.toasttab.com/t5/restaurant-operations/feature-request-internal-name-field-for-item... https://community.toasttab.com/t5/restaurant-operations/guest-facing-item-names/m-p/18845#M7879 

[Isaac1]

Another option is when browsing the item or modifier database, or adding an item through Menu Management, it would be much more helpful to display the hierarchy of each item or modifier group.

For example, if I’m looking at a modifier group, I should be able to see which items it belongs to, which groups those items are in, and which menus they belong to. Similarly, when selecting an item to add to a menu, I should be able to see its existing group + menu associations and displaying the unique item or modifier group ID alongside this information would make it much easier to identify the correct object, especially when working with duplicated menus that have identical names.