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Help guides and articles for your catering business.
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Adding Special Diets to an Order
Handling guests' special diets β chef's choice, meal replacements, gluten-free, vegetarian and the like β is one of the most common questions we get. This guide covers the recommended workaround for capturing that information so it flows through to both the quote and the chef docket.
Step 1 β Create a Special Diet Category
In your Menu Items, create a category called Special Diet. Inside it, add items for the diets you handle most often β for example Chef's Choice, Meal Replacement, Gluten-Free, Vegetarian, and so on. Name them however suits your business; you can also keep a generic Custom Item that you rename for each quote.
Setting these up once means they're ready to drop into any quote later, rather than being typed out from scratch each time.
Step 2 β Add Them to the Quote
Special diet details usually arrive after you've built the initial quote, so this is normally the last thing you add. Open the quote and go to the Special Diet section β it makes sense to keep it at the end of the menu.
From there you can either pick one of the items you set up in Step 1 (renaming it as needed) or add a one-off item on the spot. How much detail you capture is up to you β some caterers include the guest's name, their dietary requirement, and the table number; others keep it simple.
- You don't need a menu header when the item sits under the dedicated Special Diet section.
- Choose whether to display it in the quote β usually worth showing so the customer can see their requests have been captured.
- Add each requirement as its own line. If you have 10 special diets, add 10 items, each with its own details.
Step 3 β Save and Check the Chef Docket
Save the quote. The special diet items appear at the bottom of the menu section, and β importantly β they carry through to the chef docket under the Special Diet heading. The kitchen then gets a clean, itemised list of every special diet for the event.
A Note on This Approach
This is a workaround rather than a dedicated feature β but it's a reliable one that gets special diets onto both the quote and the chef docket today. It's a frequently requested area, and we're actively working on ways to make the process smoother.
If you also want to flag standard dietary suitability (gluten-free, vegan, etc.) and allergens on your regular menu items, see Dietary Codes & Allergens.