How to add meal menus with dessert choices

This article will show you how you can make dessert choices visible to parents and guardians via the Parent Portal or App, alongside the main meal they select for their child each day.

Please note: This is only possible if your school is using the Meal Menus option. This guidance is based on schools that do not charge additionally for a dessert, but incorporate this into the overall meal price.

Adding additional provisions

You will need to ensure that you have as many provisions set up, as dessert options each day and for each provision type. This is because you can only set the same meal provision once per day when creating your meal menu. 

For example, if you offer 3 desserts a day, and you have a hot meal provision and a cold packed lunch provision, you will need to add each of these provisions 3 times, as shown in the image below:

To set up a provision:

• Navigate to School > Meals > [on the left-hand side] Setup (if you are not there already) 
• Click on the 'Provisions' option in the section of the meal you want to add a Provision to
• Click on the green Add Provisions button to open a slide-over.
• In the slide-over, you need to enter details about the provision. 

For provisions provided by the school, you will be prompted to add Pricing for these.

For further guidance on adding provisions, please go to Setting Up Meals - Step 2 - Provisions.

Building your menu

Once you have completed the mandatory steps 1-5 in the Meals setup, you can now create your meal menu. 

To add provisions to a meal menu:

• Go to School > Meals > [on the left-hand side] Setup
• Click on Meal Menus in the table under the heading of the meal you want to add a menu for
• Find the name of the menu you want to build out
• Click on View meal menu 

Click the grey +Add button to add new rows to the table - each row allows you to add new meal options.

• Each meal option has two elements:
  • A Provision - These are the generic meal categories you set up during Step 2 Meals setup process. For example, Hot meal option 1. If your provisions have prices set, ensure that your provisions match the labels that correspond to that pricing.
  • A Label - This is the name of the meal option you see on the Portal and in Meal registers. This allows you to set one provision and price, but to match this to different meal options depending on the day of the week. For example, Hot School Lunch 1 can be labelled as Spaghetti on Monday and Pizza on Tuesday.

This is where you want to add the dessert choices available each day, after the main meal choice 
E.g. Spaghetti Bolognese & Sponge Pudding.

For further guidance on adding meal menus, please go to Rotating Meal Menus - Adding Provisions to Menus.

Dessert Choices on the Parent Portal

When parents and guardians go to make the meal choice for their child, they will see whatever you put in the Provision Label field, and can therefore choose which dessert their child should have along with the main meal.

Meal Choices in the Daily Summary

To view the amount of each provision selected on a given day, go to School > Meals > Meal Sittings > Daily Summary. 

Ensure that you have selected the correct lunch sitting from the tabs at the top of the table, and remember you can change the date you are viewing, but this will default to today's date.

In the Provision Label column, you will see the name of the meal menu choices, including the dessert.