Menus across several locations

One location is a menu. Two is a process. By the third, most groups have discovered that neither extreme works: forcing every site to be identical ignores real differences in rent, wages and clientele, while letting each site keep its own menu means a price change is now a project.

What genuinely differs between sites

• ✓Price. A downtown site and a suburban one face different rent and different willingness to pay, and pretending otherwise costs margin at one and covers at the other.
• ✓Availability. Equipment, storage and supplier coverage differ; not every kitchen can make everything.
• ✓A small number of local items. One site's neighbourhood favourite that would not sell anywhere else.

What should not differ is the identity of an item. If the same dish exists as a separate record at every site, your reporting can never answer how it performs across the group, which is most of the reason to have a group.

One catalog, local decisions

The model that scales is a single product catalog owned centrally, with per-location decisions layered on top: what this site sells, at what price, and what is currently available here. A dish is one record everywhere, so its performance is comparable, while the local reality is respected.

Opening a new site without starting from a blank menu

The other recurring cost is opening. Building a new location's menu from scratch is both slow and a source of drift — a category named slightly differently, an item missed, a price typo that survives for months.

Starting from an existing site's menu and editing it removes nearly all of that. The new location begins from a version you have already refined rather than from a blank grid.

How this works in Opero

Products are an account-wide catalog and menus are per location, so a dish is one record with one identity across the group while each site controls which items appear. Per-location overrides carry both availability and a price override, which is what lets one site charge differently without spawning a duplicate item.

Opening a site is a copy-then-edit: a location's menu structure — categories, items and overrides — can be copied onto another location as a starting point and then adjusted, rather than rebuilt. And because availability is per location, one kitchen running out never affects another.

One thing to plan around: Opero does not switch menus automatically by time of day. A lunch and dinner menu are managed as menu content rather than as a schedule that flips itself at a set hour.