Item details: allergens, tags and images
What this covers
The fields that make an item genuinely useful to a guest rather than just a line of text. Needs the manage-settings permission.
Allergens
Type an allergen and press Enter, as many as apply — "e.g. nuts — press Enter". They show as badges on the item, and — more importantly — guests can filter the menu to hide anything containing them.
Because they are free text, consistency is everything:
- Agree the exact words before you start. "nuts", "Nuts" and "tree nuts" are three different allergens as far as the filter is concerned, and a guest hiding one still sees the others.
- Write the list down and keep it beside whoever maintains the menu.
- Use the standard names for your market — in the EU and UK that is the 14 declarable allergens.
Tabledoo shows what you type. It does not know what is in your food, does not infer allergens from a description, and does not check anything you enter. An item with the allergens left blank looks, to a filtering guest, like an item that is safe. Fill them in.
This is separate from allergies recorded against a guest — see Recording allergies and dietary needs.
Tags
Same input style — type and press Enter, "e.g. vegan — press Enter" — but tags are the opposite of allergens: guests filter to show only items with them.
Useful ones: vegan, vegetarian, gluten-free, spicy, house special, new.
The same consistency rule applies, and one more: tag honestly. A guest who orders something tagged gluten-free is trusting you.
Images
One photo per item. Tabledoo suggests around 800×600, and WebP if you have it — though a normal JPEG from a phone is fine and gets compressed automatically before upload.
Advice worth more than the specification:
- Photograph some dishes, not all of them. A menu where six dishes look wonderful and the rest have no photo reads far better than one where forty dishes have mediocre photos.
- Be consistent. Same angle, same light, same crop. Mixed styles look worse than no photos.
- Make it the real portion. A photo that oversells is a complaint at the table.
- Daylight, no flash — a window seat at 11am beats any amount of editing.
Use Remove image to take one down. There is a limit on how fast images can be uploaded, so on a bulk photo session you may occasionally have to wait a moment.
Availability
The Available switch marks an item Sold Out to guests without removing it. See Building your menu.
What a guest ends up seeing
A card with the photo if there is one, the name, the description, badges for allergens and tags, and the price. Everything you fill in has somewhere to go — see The public menu page.