How to create and configure Menu Types and their default structures
Menu Types in tspoonlab let you categorize your Menus by default (daily menus, wedding banquets, caterings or buffets) and automate their internal organization.
When you configure a Menu Type, you can define a default structure of dishes or services (for example: Starters, Mains and Desserts for a traditional menu; or Cocktail Aperitif, Stations and Main for a wedding). This avoids designing the dish organization from scratch every time you create a new Menu.
This feature is aimed especially at restaurants with rotating menus, hotels with buffet or breakfast services, and catering and events companies that handle standardized service formats.
Step by step: create a Menu Type and define its structure
To create a new Menu Type and assign it the product groups that will appear by default within the tspoonlab web platform, follow this procedure:
Go to the top-right corner of the screen and click the "Options" menu (next to your username).
In the dropdown list that appears, locate and select "Menu types".
Once inside the management panel, click the three-dot dropdown menu and select "Add menu type".
In the text box, type the identifying name of the offer (for example: Buffet, Continental Breakfast, Wedding or Menu) and click "Ok".
Select the newly created Menu Type in the left-hand menu to open its record.
Go to the central block called "Product groups", click the dropdown menu and then "Edit groups" to start adding the categories of the default structure.
Type the name of each section or group (for example: Cold Appetizers, Hot Appetizers, Cheeses and Cured Meats, Breads, Pasta and Desserts) and assign each one its corresponding "type" or selection rule. You can choose between:
All included: the guest consumes every dish listed in the section. The system calculates the cost by directly summing all items in that group.
Choose one: the customer picks a single option from all those available in the section. The system calculates a simple arithmetic average of the dishes and visually shows which option is cheapest and which is most expensive.
Choose several: the customer can pick several options within the section, respecting the exact number of dishes you allow. The cost is obtained by averaging the available dishes and multiplying by the number of choices allowed.
Choose several repeating: the customer can pick several options within the set limit and may repeat the same dish within their choice. The cost adjusts automatically to reflect the financial impact of consuming the same product more than once.
Click "Ok" and the system will save the changes automatically.
Once this process is complete, every time you go to "Offer", "Menus" and create a new menu selecting this specific Menu Type, the system will automatically preload the whole group structure you just saved, ready for you to simply drag in your dishes or products.
How to assign a Menu Type to a Menu
To assign a Menu Type to a new Menu in tspoonlab, go to "Offer", "Menus", "Add menu" and select the "Menu type". You'll find more on how to do this by following the step by step in the article Introduction to Menus 🍱.
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