Below are the key principles to keep in mind as you’re setting up and editing your menus in Brandibble. Getting to know these principles will allow you to utilize the full flexibility of the system, which is designed to give you very granular control over your menus.

You’ll see why this is important as you read on, but suffice it to say that it makes our system a lot more flexible and can save you a great deal of time.

One of the benefits of the Brandibble system is that it allows you to attach a lot of descriptive information to a menu item (which is very helpful for your customers), such as:

But we realize that adding or updating this information takes some time, and the last thing you want to be doing is entering the same information in multiple places (and trying to keep it all in sync over time…).

So in Brandibble, we allow you to create a menu item once, and then add it to as many categories you want. That way, when you update a description or anything else, the changes will be reflected everywhere. You’ll see why this is useful as you read on.

This is another big time saver. Say you have a menu item like Sweet Potatoes that you want to make available as both a standalone menu item and as a side that can be added to an entree. Instead of having to create both a Sweet Potatoes menu item and a Sweet Potatoes modifier (filling out a name, description, etc. in both places), you can just create a Sweet Potatoes menu item, and then add that menu item to a modifier group (which can then be attached to an entree menu item).

Our system allows you to create three different menus depending on order type: 

The Online Ordering menu is your standard in-store menu for orders from individual customers. Catering is for group orders and E-Commerce is for merch.

You can create a "master" menu that works across all of your locations if the items are pretty much the same. We then allow you to manage differences across locations via the Menus by Location page, as you’ll see in the next section. You can also create more than one menu for each order type (online ordering, catering, e-commerce) if your menus vary drastically from location to location

If you have multiple locations, managing multiple menus can be a pain and chew up a lot of time. Also, more often than not, your menus tend to be very similar from one location to the next. Brandibble makes it easy to manage this by allowing you to maintain a single master Online Ordering menu, and then removing menu items from individual locations via the Menus by Location page.

So, the general process is to populate all of your menu items in each of your master menus (Online Ordering and Catering), and then to visit the “Menus by Location” page to remove items from individual locations as needed. Since menus tend to be pretty similar across locations, this tends to be a more efficient way to manage any differences.

On each category page, you’ll see a set of checkboxes that looks like this:

These checkboxes can be used to remove a category from the menu for a given daypart, day of the week, or service type.

For instance, you may want your Breakfast Sandwiches category to only be available during the Breakfast daypart, in which case you would uncheck all of the boxes under Lunch and Dinner, like you see in the image above.

Or maybe you have a Shakes category that should only be available for Pickup because delivering shakes is too much of a pain. In this case, you would remove the Shakes category from the Delivery menu by unchecking the boxes in the Delivery column

These checkboxes give you very granular control over when each of your categories show up on the menu for your customers.

At certain locations, you may only want to offer pickup orders to your customers. Or maybe you want to offer delivery as well, but only during dinner, not lunch. This can be done via the Service Types page for each location, which looks like this:

By unchecking these boxes, you can remove either the Delivery or Pickup option for a particular day and daypart. As a result, your customers will only be able to select the service type option that you make available at that time.

Brandibble gives you very granular control over what appears on your menu at each location, and your menus can be further customized by daypart, service type, or day of the week. But with great power comes great responsibility, so it may be a little tricky to remember these principles at times, which is why we wrote up this post. If you ever need a little reminder, just head back here and give it a quick skim.