A well-structured menu is not only about listing items, but also about presenting a carefully planned food and beverage selection that's easy to navigate for guests and streamlines the ordering process.

Before creating your first food & beverage checkout, plan the structure of your menu. Then once you have your plan in place, you're ready to move on.

After planning the structure of your menu, you'll know each menu section you want to create, and which menu items will go in each section.

For example, you might plan to divide your menu into three sections: Hot food, Snacks and Cold drinks. Your hot food items include:

• Hot dogs
• Pizza
• Hamburgers
• Hot chips

Using product tags, you can assign each of these food items the same tag (Hot food) and then add them to the Hot food menu section together, without having to select each item one by one.

If you want to group your menu items by tag, you have to first create your product tags behind the scenes. From Venue Manager, go to Stock to do so. 

When you add products to your menu sections by tag, any new items with this tag will automatically be added to your menu.

We recommend using product tags, as it’s much simpler to set up and manage your menu sections this way.

Next, to prevent guests from ordering from your menu while your venue is closed or unavailable for orders, make sure you configure your operating hours — the days and hours your venue is open. 

Your food & beverage checkout will only be available to order from during the operating hours you set for your venue.

By default, all menu items in your food & beverage checkout will be available to guests based on your operating hours, unless you override them with stock periods.

And finally, if your food and beverage operations don't fully align to your operating hours, you can use stock periods to override your checkout availability.

For example, your operating hours are configured from 10 am to 8 pm, but your kitchen may only take hot food orders between 12 pm and 3 pm. In this scenario, stock periods can be used to set this availability.

You're able to create a stock period for hot food with the hours set from 12 pm to 3 pm. This stock period can then be assigned to all sections of your online menu that have hot food.