I used to say the menu is the storefront. Now I feel the menu is the first filtering place. When a guest goes to your menu, they're shopping for your product, and they need attributes to decide what they can and cannot order — particularly if they're one of the 33 million people with a food allergen. One in ten guests needs that granular level of data. We see it in the data: the menu is shifting from a physical storefront you walk by to an information-gathering platform. Who is this person that's looking? Did they find what they wanted to eat? Did they remove an ingredient? How many times do they come back? Is it certain day parts? Brands and operators should look at the menu not just as a description of what you're selling, but as an opportunity to understand who your guest is.

On average, a smart menu guest interacts 20 times per session — filters, searches, ingredient searches. That's a huge amount of data. It also shows the restaurant that the menu is going blind the other 19 times, because on a traditional menu you only get one interaction: the physical reading of the description.

Around 11% of adults have a medically confirmed food allergy. Twenty to twenty-five percent have food intolerances, like lactose or garlic — someone who can have fresh chopped garlic but not garlic powder is going to look for that on menus. Vegetarian is about 4%, vegan about 1% — I don't want to downplay those, they matter. And specialty diets, paleo to keto and everything between, about 70% of people participate at any given time. Cumulatively that's a large chunk of the market. We're also talking about life and death in some cases. My daughter has an extreme strawberry allergy — that's not even part of the "big nine." One phrase I've come to dislike is "dietary preferences" with allergens lumped under it, because it isn't preferential. Keto, vegetarianism, veganism — those are lifestyle choices. An allergy is life or death.

Going back to garlic versus garlic powder — when you let the data tell the story, the average smart menu guest is clicking on an allergen, sliding a nutrient scale, searching by ingredient, excluding garlic powder or strawberry. We've tracked just over 11 million consumers doing about 20 interactions on average, and it's telling the industry that the menu isn't giving guests enough information. A menu description might say "garlic bread with chopped garlic and parsley," but if you have the recipe data behind the scenes — the spec sheets, the supplier data, the prep recipe — you know it's actually garlic powder.

I started in this industry 19 years ago and have been through 12 to 14 different menu labeling regulations, city, county, state, and the federal rule that became required in 2018 — calories on the menu and nutrients available on request once you hit 20 or more locations. To this day in 2026 I talk to 40-50 location brands who know they should be doing it but haven't been told to yet. What's shifting with the allergen law is the conversation: one in ten guests has a food allergen, more allergens keep coming, and modern diners expect the level of personalization they get everywhere else in their digital lives. Put facts on top of that and you get a real overlap between what guests expect and what's now legally required. It's binding legislation in California July 1st, there are 13 other pending state bills, and I'd expect it to be wrapped into a national bill within about a year and a half. I'd encourage brands not to look at this only as a requirement — it's an opportunity, because so many people actually need this information, unlike calorie labeling, which is more of a preference. I hear from operators constantly now that guests are asking about allergens at the front of house, or emailing about it on Instagram. In 19 years, no one has ever emailed me about calories.

I think hospitality has been lost on-prem too. If a guest sat down and said, "I have a peanut allergy, could you tell me what items have peanuts?" and you said, "I don't know" — that's not very hospitable. If restaurant leaders want to claim hospitality, it's not just how you greet people or ordering consistency, it's transparency. That's the underlying thread with labeling, allergens, and even privacy laws like CCPA and GDPR — people are saying, I don't just want to know, I demand to know. As a hospitality company, you have an obligation, but also an opportunity, to deliver an experience that's sometimes preferential and sometimes life and death. If you can't answer what has peanuts in it, I can't eat here.

The Big Nine are milk, eggs, fish, crustacean shellfish, tree nuts, peanuts, wheat, soybeans, and sesame — sesame was added in 2023 because those allergies are on the rise. And like I mentioned, my daughter's strawberry allergy isn't even on that list.

I'll answer from both the operator and the guest side. From a legal and liability perspective, saying "does not contain" opens up more exposure, because it's a finite statement. If a supplier changes their spec sheet and there's a four-week lag before anyone catches it, and your PDF still says "egg-free," that's a problem. It's better to say "contains" than "does not contain." From the guest side, this is where it gets interesting — when we surveyed consumers in 2025, they don't fully believe the "free from" label either. Even if it says "egg-free," they'll still ask front-of-house to confirm, because they don't know if the recipe changed, or if cross-contact happened with a shared knife. We also found that guests with certain allergens will turn on our vegan filter as a second check — if you have an egg or dairy allergy, you'll also flip on the vegan filter just to double-check the data lines up. When we asked consumers about it, the sentiment was basically: we don't know if it's true anymore, so having a second layer of confirmation increases their confidence in ordering.

Exactly. Case study of one: in my house, if anything has the word "berry" on it, we stay away, because sometimes — especially with supplier-driven items rather than a chef-driven concept — a bit of strawberry sneaks in for color or flavor. A lot of brands are also moving away from artificial dyes, particularly for items marketed to under-18s, and using strawberry, raspberry, or beet for natural coloring instead of Red Dye 40. That's a great point I hadn't even connected to allergies before.

I always tell operators: the odds that you already have two or three menu items that check the boxes for most of that 85-million-guest group — food allergy, a family member's allergy, vegan, vegetarian — are pretty high. You probably already have a Caesar salad, or a version without anchovies, or mac and cheese. But those items are often buried deep in a PDF or behind several layers of the menu. I understand the reason a zip code gate exists before you see the menu, but it's still a barrier to entry — imagine Spotify asking for a bunch of information before it'll even show you what you can listen to. A lot of operators already have the right menu items; the problem is they're adding layers between the guest and a safe order. We typically see about 42% of guests with a food allergy sign up for a loyalty program, versus 11-14% for guests overall. If you know a restaurant consistently serves your family safely, you go back. Otherwise you're rolling the dice on whether the PDF and the staff got it right.

What we do is pull in the recipes, spec sheets, and prep recipes from inventory and recipe management platforms, and we partner with food distributors for that data. We map it, clean it, apply nutrition analysis if the brand wants it, add the allergens, and build what we call a smart menu — a separate menu on the brand's website. Guests are trained to look in the footer for a "nutrition guide" or "allergen" link, which used to be a PDF and is now a smart menu. Some brands are even putting it directly on the main menu instead of routing guests elsewhere. And because we now integrate with ordering, it's not just a search-and-discovery tool anymore — it's another digital ordering channel that a static PDF could never be.

Our out-of-the-box solution gets brands up and running quickly, but with custom builds we're integrating into user profiles — pulling in a guest by email so the system already knows they're vegan and can't eat peanuts, while still letting them adjust preferences themselves. It extends the digital experience without bolting on another system for brands with the right economics. And it's not just digital — I don't know if we've talked about this, but making the data available to on-prem staff matters just as much. We've all seen the binder. It's better than nothing, but no one's scouring a nutrition sheet with a line behind them. Having that software available for staff to search, or for the guest to look up themselves, removes the anxiety of holding up the line.

A static PDF or web page with expandable sections isn't really searchable — you can't click through it the way AI needs to. The smart menu is built to be searchable, so if a guest asks an AI tool to show gluten-free pizza nearby, we can surface it because the menu items carry the allergen tags the AI can read. There was a report from Google about a year ago — they'd converted a restaurant's static PDF menu into a structured format and saw something like a 154% to 174% increase in vegetarian taco searches. Before that, a guest hitting a PDF would likely have just bounced. It's like the old Pac-Man problem — the AI is moving around trying to find an answer, and if it can't quickly find an easy gluten-free or vegetarian option, it moves on in a millisecond. My 11-year-old already goes straight to ChatGPT the way we used to go to Ask Jeeves or Google. If you keep your ingredient and allergen data behind a PDF wall, you're going to miss out on AI proactively surfacing you in that search.

Right, and the prep side is usually the easy part — most brands know their procedures. The spec sheet is the part people don't think about until we bring it up: if you're sourcing an ingredient from a distributor, what's actually in it? You have to go find out and document it, and that's its own project.

It's so important that culinary and nutrition have a seat at that decision-making table, because 85 million guests ultimately need the data that team is working so hard to calculate. Too often marketing and operations put it into a PDF, put it on a website, and it collects dust — and the momentum from all that culinary and nutrition work gets lost. The point of sale can tell you Lucy ordered the cranberry turkey sandwich. The smart menu can tell you Lucy clicked the turkey sandwich, removed the aioli, took out the cranberry sauce, added balsamic dressing, and switched to gluten-free bread before adding it to her order. Run that across enough guests and you start seeing patterns — say, at lunchtime in New York, people keep clicking the cranberry turkey sandwich but removing the cranberry, or adding pesto. Maybe that tells you to build a turkey pesto sandwich. The POS alone just tells you what someone ordered and which modifiers they dropped — without knowing intent, you're driving blind. That's where culinary can sit at the table and say, show me what the smart menu data says, and connect it back to what's already happening in the kitchen.

It's a handshake between the back-of-house data and the front-of-house experience. Marketing and digital already feel like they know everything about the guest because of point-of-sale data — but the real opportunity is what you can learn pre-purchase, and feed that back into what culinary and nutrition are doing. That keeps a flywheel of value going for both the operator and the guest.

Exactly — my father always said sales is a vanity number, and it's the same with menu POS data sometimes. Once you get to about four to six filters applied on the smart menu, conversion to order goes up by roughly a third. Layer that with how often guests are removing specific ingredients, and it paints a real picture of what your seasonal items, LTOs, and location-specific choices should be — instead of just "the cranberry turkey sandwich is our bestseller" when 90% of guests are actually taking the cranberry off. In our data, California, New York, and Illinois were the top three states for this kind of personalization activity.

Find me on LinkedIn — Lucy Logan. I post a series called "the smarter menu" every couple of weeks with insights like the ones we covered today. And you can reach me directly at lucy@everybite.com.