xtraCHEF: Toast Menu Considerations and Best Practices

This article contains suggestions only. You are solely responsible for developing and maintaining your Toast menu. If you have any questions concerning your Toast menu, contact the Customer Care team.

In this Article:

xtraCHEF and Your Toast Menu
Toast Menu Considerations

xtraCHEF and Your Toast Menu

Much of xtraCHEF’s advanced Recipe and Inventory reporting builds off of your Toast menu. More specifically, every transaction and combination of menu items and modifiers is recorded by into Toast Web and synced to xtraCHEF daily.

Because every restaurant is unique, your Toast menu can be configured in a variety of ways to support different menu item, modifier, and size combinations. However, the same menu items and modifiers that create a straightforward checkout experience on your Toast POS may not translate well to your xtraCHEF account. This article will dive into best practices and considerations for your Toast menu through the lens of creating a seamless Toast and xtraCHEF integration.

Note: You must integrate your Toast Web and xtraCHEF accounts for menu and sales data to sync. Learn more about this step in xtraCHEF: Sync with Toast.

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Toast Menu Considerations

Your Toast menu consists of a variety of menu items and modifiers. Typically, your menu items represent specific entrees or orders. Modifiers, on the other hand, often indicate the removal or addition of ingredients, sides, or items that aren't included by default. Modifiers may apply to several menu items or just one.

In xtraCHEF, menu items are mapped to a specific Recipe, whereas modifiers are mapped to a specific Product (Ingredient) or Prep Recipe. Each menu item must be mapped to a corresponding Recipe to populate in reporting. By connecting these dots, xtraCHEF can begin comparing your prime costs with relevant sales data to create your Product Mix Report and Inventory Analytics.

When creating or altering your Toast Menu with xtraCHEF in mind, it’s important to consider the following:

Could I accurately create a recipe that is standard for this menu item? Or is my menu item too vague?
Am I using modifiers as they’re intended?

Best Practices

If the recipe for the new menu item or modifier is the same as another menu item or modifier, copy the menu item or modifier group.
If the recipe for the new menu item or modifier is different in portion size or ingredients, create a new menu item or modifier group.

Food Menu Items:

Combination Plates and "Choose Your Own..." Dishes: It's not uncommon for restaurants to create a menu item titled "Combo Platter" or a "Choose your Own..." type of dish. These may be menu items where the modifiers assigned to them indicate the choice of both entree and sides. Because your menu item must have a corresponding Recipe in xtraCHEF, these menu items would be too vague and complicate your Product Mix Mapping.

In this situation, a suggested best practice would be to create more specific menu items such as "Burger Platter", "Chicken Sandwich Platter", etc. These examples could be mapped to a specific Recipe while still including your modifier combinations for additional ingredients or side dishes.

"Build Your Own" Pizza: By default, pizza orders unlock endless possibilities for toppings, crusts, sauces, and more. However, because xtraCHEF reporting is based on the mapping of menu items to a corresponding Recipe, you may want to have more specific options such as "Build your Own Regular Pizza" and "Build your Own Gluten Free Pizza." Furthermore, if you offer different pizza bases as well, you could create even more specific options such as "Build your Own White Gluten Free Pizza" or "Build your Own Barbecue Sauce Regular Pizza."

In all of these examples, you can create a corresponding Recipe that would indicate the crust and sauce used for each dish. Whereas any combination of additional toppings can be handled by modifiers.

Menu Specific Pricing: Menu Specific Pricing only works if the portion sizes and quantity served are the same between the menus.

For example, Lunch Menu/Dinner Menu Pricing will work if all portions are the same. Will not work if the lunch portion is a different size than the dinner portion.
Menu Specific Pricing on Modifiers: This works occasionally because they are just basing the recipes off individual modifiers or items. This is fine if the item is the same on both menus such as 1.5oz of vodka and 1.5oz of vodka during happy hour. However, if you are going to have different portions with menu specific pricing, such as lunch pasta and dinner pasta, then they need to be separate items.

Open Price: This only works if the recipe associated with the item is not changing daily.

For example, if you have a fish special and the type of fish is changing daily which then determines the recipe, then you need a new item or a new recipe to account for the different cost of fish types.

Beverage Menu Items

"Build Your Own" Cocktails: It's not uncommon to have menu items for cocktails broken out by liquor. However, because every menu item needs an xtraCHEF Recipe to unlock reporting, the liquor alone doesn't sufficiently depict the ingredients or even the cocktail being selected.

For example, a menu item titled "Tito's Vodka" could include any combination of mixers, garnishes, or sizes and would be too vague to connect with a standardized recipe. While these can add-on modifiers can be customized at the menu item level in modifier mapping, a best practice may be to align your cocktail menu items with the type of cocktail.
Set up cocktails to be more compatible with xtraCHEF recipes by creating cocktails as menu items and liquors as modifiers.
- Menu Item: Old Fashioned
- Modifier Group: Whiskey Cocktails
- Modifiers: Jack Daniels / Jim Beam / Woodford / Etc.
If it's done in reverse, it's a significantly heavier lift to create a recipe for each version of the cocktail based on liquor.
- Menu Item: Jack Daniels (standard pour 1.5 fl oz.)
- Modifier: Old Fashioned (2.5 fl oz pour)
Create a recipe for Jack Daniels Old Fashion to include all mixers AND the 1 fl oz. increase of Jack Daniels. Then repeat this step for each liquor that has the Old Fashioned modifier.

Size Modifiers

Size Modifiers: When creating or altering your Toast menu, you have the option of creating size modifiers for certain menu items. Once synced with xtraCHEF, size modifiers allow users to create and dictate how many portions each size includes.

For example, your standard portion for "French Onion Soup" may be a 6 fluid ounce cup. However, that same dish may come in a 12 fluid ounce bowl. In this situation, you would be able to indicate that a bowl serving is simply 2 portions of French Onion Soup when creating your Recipe in xtraCHEF.

An important distinction to make here is that size modifiers do not allow for the substitution of items based on the dish's portion. For example, if different packaging is associated with larger sizes. In those cases, you may want to consider creating a separate menu item for your sizes.

If the entire recipe does not scale together in size, then size-based pricing can't be mapped correctly in xtraCHEF.

For example, if all ingredients on a regular sandwich are doubled for a large (2x bread, 2x meat, 2x cheese, etc), then size-based pricing works. If only some ingredients increase in amount for the large size, xtraCHEF Size Based Pricing will not work and modifiers should be used to determine the size, or separate menu items. In most instances, Size Based Pricing works the best for: wine, beer, soups (where everything scales up or down equally).

Note: Size modifiers are different than your standard modifiers. Creating a standard modifier titled "Large" does not give the option to scale menu items by portion in xtraCHEF.

Size Pricing That Will Work	Size Pricing That Will Not Work
Draft Beer 12oz/16oz/24oz The entire product served proportionally increases	Large, medium, small coffee Will not work for items like drinks if the customer is calculating paper costs because each cup size is a distinct product. Size for coffee shops where some parts of a Recipe remain the same (for instance, if medium vanilla latte increases expresso and milk, but same volume of vanilla syrup, sizing will not work (all pieces of Recipe scale up)).
Grey Goose vodka single shot/double The amount of alcohol served is proportionate modifiers and this would not be affected	12oz/16oz bottle of Budweiser Would not work because each size bottle/can is a distinct product
	Large or small empanada Would not work because premade items or different items are a distinct prep item.
	12oz/16oz prime rib Would not work. Although the prime rib is proportionate, the sides on the plate are not.

Modifiers

NEW! Nested Modifiers: Nested modifiers add extra customization options to the parent modifiers in your Toast menu and are now available for xtraCHEF Pro customers. You can find them in Product Mix Mapping to connect modifiers with your xtraCHEF recipes and ingredients. They will also deplete accordingly for inventory and AvT reporting.

Substitutions with Modifiers: Modifiers are likely already an important part of your Toast menu. Modifiers are used to either add or subtract an additional ingredient or side. Similarly, in xtraCHEF, modifiers cannot both add and subtract an ingredient or side. For that reason, you may want to consider creating both Add and No modifiers. For example, ‘Add Onion’ and ‘No Onion’.

Duplicate Modifiers: It is always best to limit modifiers and modifier groups as this makes building and managing menus easier. xtraCHEF is only concerned with portion sizes for particular modifiers and only requires distinct modifier groups if the portions are affected. If the modifiers are all using the same amount of an ingredient, it is easy to map multiple modifiers at once as long as the modifier names are exactly the same.

Pre-Modifiers: Pre Modifiers do not work for xtraCHEF. The work around is to create distinct modifier groups for "NO", "ADD", "LITE", "XTRA".

Duplicate Modifiers: It is always best to limit modifiers and modifier groups as this makes building and managing menus easier.

xtraCHEF is only concerned with portion sizes for particular modifiers and only requires distinct modifier groups if the portions are affected.
If the modifiers are all using the same amount of an ingredient, it is easy to map multiple modifiers at once as long as the modifier names are exactly the same.