Adding Special Diets

At a wedding or a seated dinner you usually need four things recorded for every guest with a special diet: their name, what the requirement is, where they are sitting, and which dish is being replaced. Puree has no dedicated screen for that yet, so this page covers the way we recommend doing it: a Special Diets category with one line per guest, which carries straight through to the chef docket.

Step 1. Create a Special Diets category

In your Menu Items, create a category called Special Diets. Call it whatever suits you: Dietary Requirements, Dietaries, Dietary Advised. Two things about how you set it up decide whether it works:

• Put it in the Menu group. Only menu categories print on the chef docket, so a dietary category filed under equipment or miscellaneous will never reach the kitchen.
• Move it to the end of your menu categories. Dietary details almost always arrive after the menu is agreed, and the chef wants to read them last, after the dishes they relate to.

Step 2. Add your standard requirements as items

Inside the category, add a zero priced item for each requirement you see often. A typical set is Vegetarian, Vegan, Gluten Free, Coeliac, Dairy Free, Nut Allergy, Chef’s Choice, Meal Replacement, and Dietary To Be Advised for the guests the client has not confirmed yet.

Keep the price at $0 if you absorb dietary meals, or price them if you charge for an alternative main. Setting this up once means the whole set is ready to drop into any quote, rather than being typed out from scratch each time.

Step 3. Add one line per guest

On the quote, open the Special Diets category and add a line for each guest. Pick the closest item, rename the line so it names the guest, and use the line’s note for the seating and the meal being replaced.

A few points decide whether this reads well in the kitchen or badly:

• Leave the quantity at 1 and give each guest their own line. Ten special diets means ten lines. A line with a quantity of zero is left off the chef docket entirely.
• Put the guest’s name in the line name. The docket adds up lines that share a name, so five lines all called “Gluten Free” print as one line of 5, while five named lines stay itemised.
• Use the note for the detail. The note prints in bold beside the line on the docket, so the table, the seat and the dish being replaced land exactly where the chef is reading.
• Anything unusual that does not match one of your standard items can be added as a one off custom item on the spot. See Custom Items & One-Off Packages.
• You do not need a menu header for these lines. The category name is heading enough.

Step 4. Decide what the customer sees

Each line has a display in quote setting. Most caterers leave the lines visible so the client can check the list and confirm they have told you about everyone, which is worth doing when the requirements arrived by email over several weeks. Turn it off on any line you would rather keep to the kitchen. See Hiding the Customer View.

Step 5. Check the chef docket

Save the quote and open the chef docket. The lines appear under the Special Diets heading with their quantity, the guest’s name and the note, at the end of the menu. The kitchen gets an itemised register rather than a paragraph to re-read on service.

What about chef instructions?

Plenty of caterers type the whole dietary list into the Chef instructions box on the order instead, in the style of “1 x Gluten Free: Maegan Nicol, table 8, soup, beef, sticky toffee pudding”. That is fine for one or two guests, and it is the right place for genuine instructions to the kitchen, such as “nut free wedding” or “plate mains at 7pm”.

For a long list it is worth moving to lines. Chef instructions are one block of free text: they print as a single paragraph on the docket, they cannot carry a note per guest, they are not counted anywhere, and they do not follow the guest onto the consolidated docket when you are cooking several events together. Lines do all four.

Related

This page is about individual guests. To flag dietary suitability and allergens on your regular menu items, so vegan and gluten free dishes are marked on the quote and allergens are listed on kitchen documents, see Dietary Codes, Allergens & Menu Disclaimer.

A dedicated place to record guest level dietary requirements is one of the most requested things on our list. This is the approach we recommend until it exists.