Your menu is a guest data engine
Recorded live from a food-ondemand trade show floor in Dallas, EveryBite co-founder Lucy Logan joins Chat GTM host Michael Beck to talk through smart menus, the new Atlas API, and the revenue numbers behind guests with dietary restrictions.
What EveryBite does
Lay it out for me — what does EveryBite do, and who's it for?
Our whole purpose is taking a restaurant's menu and turning it into a guest data engine — marrying up the ingredients, the nutrition, and the allergen data, so the 85 million people trying to buy your product can safely explore the menu based on their dietary preferences.
Where does that 85 million come from — is that people with food sensitivities?
33 million people in the U.S., and growing, have one or more food allergens. The rest of that group is vegan, vegetarian, or people watching specific nutrient thresholds. Right now, your menu is a blind spot for one in ten Americans with a food allergen or dietary preference.
So you're rolling the dice.
Exactly. Actually, flying in today I did a roundup on our allergens — there are 13 enacted pieces of legislation that are going to hit the food industry in the next six to nine months, all requiring allergens to be posted either on the menu or at the point of purchase.
How this started
Before we get further into EveryBite — what made you think of this? Usually there's a personal moment behind it, or a family member.
I've been fortunate that I haven't personally, or through a family member, gone through a food allergic reaction — I know there are other companies whose founding story starts there. For me, it came out of doing nutrition and allergen analysis for 19 years, meeting menu labeling regulations for restaurant chains. In the U.S., if you're over 20 locations, you've had to provide calories on the menu since around 2017-2018. We used to hand restaurants Excel files or PDFs. Then we started noticing customers going back into the system making changes — lowering sodium, adding vegetarian options — so we asked why, and they said front-of-house was getting so many questions from guests. That was the meeting of the minds: how do we take the compliance piece, nutrition and allergens, and turn it into something personal that unlocks a better guest experience and loyalty.
From PDF to smart menu
It sounds like what's out there today barely checks the box — a PDF somewhere that someone has to open and squint through to find what might hurt them.
Right. And we know 91% of consumers view the menu before they go on-premise, and 68% of that happens on mobile on our platform. If you're accessing a PDF at some tiny font size and zooming in, that's a broken experience. So we built Smart Menu — it looks identical to the restaurant's actual menu, but a guest can say "I'm looking for items free from wheat and free from egg," and it reads all the ingredients, the supplier specs, and the nutrition labels, then dynamically changes the menu in a split second: "Here are your 25 matches." We literally call it "your menu, your matches."
Does it nest into what the restaurant already has? If I go to their website and look at the menu, does it dynamically change what I'm shown?
A guest clicks a link that says "view nutrition and allergen info," which opens our platform. If you've already used any of our smart menus before, it welcomes you back — because if you're allergic to wheat at one restaurant, you're allergic to it at others, so we keep that context across our network. About two weeks ago we also pivoted to an API, which means a restaurant can take that exact same data and display it across any digital channel, not just the website, which is where we've traditionally lived.
Go-to-market and the loyalty numbers
What's been the friction point getting this out into the world?
Probably the misinformation that nutrition and allergen data is bad for business, or that it's purely a compliance piece. I push back on that — there's a blind spot for 85 million customers who can't access the menu the way they want to, and the loyalty numbers are off the charts. If you have a food allergy, you'll spend 24% more eating out, and you'll eat out more often at the same brand once you know it's safe — versus a guest who can't find allergen info for a family member and just orders grocery takeout instead, or doesn't go out at all. The revenue and loyalty numbers are there in spades, but it's been hard getting brands to connect compliance to opportunity. It's the same data either way — you can drag it around like a ball and chain, or hold it up like a beacon and say, we're the ones who can help you.
Is this a SaaS product? How do you sell it?
The API is a standard, call-based product. Smart Menu is SaaS, priced off the number of locations in a group.
Are you live in the U.S. already, or still in beta?
We're rolling out across the U.S. — 9,000 locations currently use Smart Menu. Cracker Barrel is a well-known one, they've been using it a while, along with Steak 'n Shake and HoneyGrow, a big Olo partner — we're actually speaking with HoneyGrow and Olo tomorrow. In 2025, 9.4 million consumers went to our smart menus to interact with our brands' menus. From there, guests click an order button that drops them at the restaurant's ordering site to build their order. At an average order value of $35, that's roughly $6 million guests with dietary preferences tried to spend at our restaurant partners. That's why the API matters so much — we can now link that up to Olo, Toast, and other online ordering platforms to carry search and discovery all the way through to purchase.
You could drag it around with you like a ball and chain, or you can hold it up like a beacon saying we're leading with this. We're the ones that can help you.Lucy Logan
So you've got data now that substantiates a real financial uplift.
Yeah — a 42% increase in loyalty signups from guests with dietary preferences, and it's a bit higher for guests with allergens specifically. That tracks: if you have a food allergy, you want to sign up for a loyalty program from a brand that says "we know who you are, we know what you can eat, and we'll consistently serve that to you in our offers" — instead of, say, sending a buy-one-get-one meat lovers pizza offer to a vegetarian.
Why B2B, not B2C
Is there a consumer-facing app too — something I could open in a new city to see all the options available to me?
We looked at that a couple of years ago and thought about it again since, but we realized the bigger unlock in the industry is filtering the water at the top of the dam, rather than doing it household by household. We'll have a bigger impact for everyone by going B2B. I take my hat off to any B2C company in this space, especially food exploration — you have to win people one at a time, whereas going through businesses gets you a much bigger net.
Busting the myth
If you could bust one myth about this part of the industry — get everyone listening to understand one thing — what would it be?
Static menus are probably hiding around $33 billion of revenue — that's how much guests with a food allergen spend every year instead on CPG, consumer packaged goods, because they can't find what they need at restaurants.
Is there a liability angle here too — if someone gets sick and the information could have been disclosed?
Our brands carry the traditional disclaimers you'd expect. And in California specifically, there's liability wrapped around nearly everything. California also has the first law taking effect July 1st — restaurants there have to put allergens on the menu or in a digital format. It's the first state to pass any menu labeling law specifically around posting allergens. It's similar to how the calorie bills spread state by state before getting wrapped into the Affordable Care Act — New York and Illinois are next, then Maryland, and I'd expect a federal requirement by the end of 2027 or 2028.
What's next: the Atlas API
What are you most excited about right now?
The API. We hear from customers that Smart Menu is great, but they also want this data in the mobile app, in the kiosk — everywhere a guest interacts with them. So we built what we call the Atlas API: a single source of truth that beams the same data out to every guest-facing channel. I think that's going to be huge, both for operational time savings and for the guest experience.
Where does the underlying nutrition data come from — is it fed by USDA data?
On the back end of Smart Menu we run our own nutrition analysis platform. We've calculated about a million recipes from our customers over the years.
How can people find you?
Lucy Logan on LinkedIn, everybite.com, or lucy@everybite.com.
