Online Menus

What Are Online Menus?

Online menus are public-facing pages that display your food or beverage offerings. You build and maintain them in Puree, then link to them from your own website — so when a customer clicks "Menus" on your site they land on a page you can update yourself, without going back to a web developer every time a dish changes.

Puree styles the page to match your website — your fonts, colours and logo — so it blends in rather than looking like a separate system. Unlike the Online Order Form, menus are read-only: they're for browsing and sharing, not ordering.

Creating a Menu

Go to Online → Manage Menus and add a menu. Choose whether it's a food or beverages menu and give it a name, such as "Buffet", "Office Catering" or "Wine List".

There's no limit on how many you create — a menu per service, per season, or per event type is all fine. Names must be unique within your account, because the menu name forms part of its public web address.

Managing a Menu

Edit a menu and you'll find three tabs, working the same way as the order form builder:

• Settings — the name, description, hero image and menu style
• Items — which items appear, and whether each shows a photo and a price
• Packages — which packages appear

The usual order of work is: pick the style and add a hero image in Settings, add your items, then save.

Menu Styles

Under Settings → Menu Style you choose how the menu looks to customers. There are four, and each menu can use a different one — so a photo-rich canapé menu and a plain office catering list can sit side by side and each look right.

• Classic — the default. A hero banner with items and their photos laid out beneath. A safe choice for most menus
• Boutique — a white page with a brass accent, large serif headings and numbered items. Photos aren't shown inline; a small camera icon links to them instead
• Showroom — an even grid of cards with square photos and generous whitespace, closer to a polished product page. Best when you have a good photo for nearly every item
• Index — an airy two-column directory with calm section headings. A photo appears only where one exists, marked with a small camera icon, so gaps don't leave holes in the layout

If you don't have many photos, Boutique and Index are the ones to reach for — they're designed to look complete without them. If photos are your strength, Showroom makes the most of them. And if you're short of photography altogether, you can generate it with AI Photos & Settings.

Adding Items to a Menu

The Items tab lists your categories — menu item categories for a food menu, beverage categories for a beverage menu. Open a category and you get four columns:

• Include — whether the item appears on this menu
• Name — pulled from the item itself
• Photo — whether the item's photo is shown
• Price — whether the price is shown

Price is off by default, and that's deliberate. Plenty of caterers want a menu that shows what they cook without publishing what it costs, so pricing can be discussed on enquiry. Tick it where you're happy to show a price and leave it clear everywhere else — the choice is per item, so you can mix the two on one menu.

Items are pulled from your existing Items & Categories, so any change to an item's name, description or dietary codes shows on the menu automatically.

Adding Packages to a Menu

The Packages tab works the same way — tick the packages you want on the menu, and choose whether each shows its photo and its price. Unlike items, package prices are shown by default, since a package price is usually the point of listing it. See Packages for how packages are built.

How Packages Are Grouped

When a menu includes Packages, each package shows its fixed items and its choice rules, using the same heading model as the customer quote. Every block has a primary header and, sometimes, a subheader beneath it. Puree fills them from the headings a card actually has — a Rule header (e.g. "Grazing Selection"), a menu header, or the item's category — and leaves out the ones it doesn't need, so a heading is never repeated.

• Primary header — the block's top heading: the Rule header if the card has one, otherwise the menu header, otherwise the category.
• Subheader — a heading nested under the primary. It only appears under a Rule header, and it's the menu header — giving Rule header → menu header → items.

So what's used depends on what the card has:

The category is only ever used as a last resort — when a group has no Rule header and no menu header — so it's never repeated under a heading that already names the block.

Hero Image and Description

A hero image sits across the top of the menu — a photo of the buffet, the room, or the food itself. Under Settings you can set:

• Hero image layout — Standard, Full Width or Tall, changing how much of the page the image takes
• Gradient overlay — fades the image into the page so heading text stays readable over it. On by default
• Description — a paragraph introducing the menu, placed either above the menu items or below the hero image

A hero image is optional. A menu without one simply starts at the first category.

Turning a Menu On and Off

Each menu in the list has an on/off switch. Switching a menu off takes it off your website immediately — it disappears from the menu list customers see, and its own page stops resolving — while everything you've set up on it is kept.

This is the tidy way to handle seasonal menus. Switch the Christmas menu off in January rather than deleting it, and switch it back on in November.

Sharing Your Menus

Each menu has its own public URL built from your business name and the menu name, and there's also a menus page listing everything you've published. Link either one from your website — most caterers point a "Menus" button at the list.

Once a customer is on a menu, they can move between your other menus of the same type without going back to your site, so a food menu offers your other food menus. If you use a Custom Domain & Website Hosting, your menus can sit on your own domain instead.

Downloading as a PDF

Every online menu carries a Download PDF link, in all four styles. Customers can save or print the menu, and you can use the same link yourself to attach a current menu to an email without maintaining a separate document. The PDF is generated from the menu as it stands, so it's never out of date.

Managing Menus

From the menus index page you can:

• Reorder — Drag menus to change the order customers see them in
• Edit — Update items, packages, style, images and descriptions
• Turn on or off — Publish or hide a menu without deleting it
• Delete — Soft-delete menus you no longer need (they can be restored later)
• View deleted — Toggle to see and restore previously deleted menus

Tips

• Match the style to the photography you actually have — Showroom looks sparse with half the photos missing, while Index and Boutique are built for menus without them
• Leave prices off where you'd rather talk about them, and on where they help the customer self-qualify
• Use high-quality hero images to make a strong first impression
• Keep menu descriptions concise — customers want to scan quickly
• Switch seasonal menus off rather than deleting them, so they're ready to bring back next year
• Attach photos to your items — they'll appear automatically wherever the style uses them
• Use separate food and beverage menus to keep things organised