Salido provides flexible and efficient restaurant operations through its robust handling of menu items, ingredients, modifiers, and variants:

• Menu Items: These are specific dishes or products on your restaurant's menu, with assigned prices and costs. Their components may include ingredients, modifiers, or variants, which provide customization options.
• Display Groups: This functionality groups related menu items for easier navigation and organization on the POS. Groups can be nested for further categorization.
• Ingredients: These are the raw materials used in menu items or as modifiers for customization.
• Modifiers: These are the customizable changes to menu items based on customer preferences, organized in Modifier Groups for efficiency.
• Variants: These are pre-defined alternate versions of a menu item or ingredient, differing in size, flavor, or other attributes.

Understanding these core elements is the key to managing your menu for efficient day-to-day operations, inventory management, and sales tracking.

How These Elements Work Together

A Menu Item is a specific dish or product available for purchase, such as a "Classic Burger" or "Cosmopolitan Cocktail." Each Menu Item has a price and cost, is used to build orders, manage inventory, and track sales data.

To keep the POS organized and easy to navigate, Menu Items are grouped into Display Groups. These groups appear as buttons on the POS and can be nested for further organization.

For example, a Display Group for "Wines" might contain nested child groups like "By The Glass" and "By The Bottle." The "By The Bottle" group could then be further categorized by "Red," "White," or "Sparkling."

Menu Items are customized using Modifiers. These are the changes or additions a guest might request, such as "extra cheese" on a burger or a steak cooked "medium rare." Modifiers themselves are often built from Ingredients, which are the raw materials in your inventory.

To efficiently manage these options, similar Modifiers are bundled into Modifier Groups. These groups are reusable and can be applied across many different Menu Items. For instance, a "Cheese Options" Modifier Group can be created once and then applied to all burgers, sandwiches, and wraps on your menu.

Modifier Groups can also be nested to handle detailed, multi-level customizations.

The screenshot below shows an example of nested Modifier Groups for a Burger. In a real-life scenario, after a server selects "Burger" from the menu, they are presented with the primary modifier options for that item.

These screens contain all the available customizations. For example, the server can first tap "Cheese Options" to see a list of cheeses like Blue cheese, Cheddar, or Gouda. From that screen, they can then tap the nested Modifier Group, "cut options," to customize the order even further by choosing how the cheese is prepared (e.g., "shredded" or "sliced"). This layered approach allows for detailed and organized order modifications.

Finally, Variants are pre-defined alternate versions of a menu item that may differ in size, flavor, or other key attributes. For instance, a "Pizza" Menu Item might have size variants (e.g., Small, Medium, Large) and crust variants (e.g., Thin, Regular, Thick). Using variants and modifiers together provides a flexible and customizable ordering experience while helping you manage inventory and pricing effectively.