Toast Menu Checker is an AI-powered menu optimization tool that analyzes a restaurant's menu and identifies gaps, strengths, and opportunities for improvement. You share your menu — by link, file, or photos — and the tool runs it through a structured set of analyses to produce a report covering areas like menu language, structure, pricing presentation, and seasonality. For more on how the Menu Checker works, see how it works.

The tool uses a third party LLM, grounding its findings in your own menu content combined with a defined set of reference sources: Toast's published research and educational content on menu strategy, expertise from Toast's restaurant-operations subject matter experts, USDA seasonal produce data, FDA allergen data, publicly available information on restaurant concepts and formats, and Toast's brand and communication guidelines. The tool does not invent data sources about your restaurant, sales, or customers.

No. Findings are based only on the content of your menu itself, compared against the reference sources listed above — not your sales history, POS data, or customer data. The tool doesn't invent data sources about your restaurant, sales, or customers beyond what's in your menu and the listed reference materials.

The tool asks for your email so it can deliver your finished report and share marketing materials about Toast products and services. This request happens during the confirmation step, after the tool shows you what it detected in your menu.

No. The report can't tell you how a specific menu change would affect order volume or revenue. Any such predictions would require more than menu content alone — it needs operational and financial data the tool doesn't have, and even then any such analysis could not be guaranteed as accurate. When a question falls outside what the report can answer, the tool says so directly and points you toward a conversation with the Toast team instead of guessing.

The tool is designed to work even if your menu lives outside Toast systems —— via file or photo upload. The tool's own materials don't require an existing Toast POS relationship to generate a report.

Yes. The tool references publicly available information on restaurant concepts and formats, so it factors in signals like whether your menu reads as fast casual, fine dining, a bar and lounge, or another format, and tailors some findings accordingly. This means two menus with similar dishes but different concepts (say, a food truck versus a full-service restaurant) may generate different findings, since expectations around structure, pricing presentation, and language differ by format.

The tool's does not have access to real-time competitor pricing or your local market specifically — findings are based on your menu's own pricing presentation (like formatting and placement) compared with general industry pricing guidance, not a live price comparison against nearby restaurants.

Toast Menu Checker compares the ingredients named in your menu against USDA seasonal produce data to flag dishes that may be built around ingredients that are out of season, or opportunities to highlight ingredients that are currently in peak season. This can surface findings related to freshness positioning or seasonal menu updates, but it doesn't have visibility into your actual sourcing or supplier relationships.

The tool can flag whether your menu offers clearly marked options for common dietary needs — such as vegetarian, vegan, gluten-free, or religious dietary categories like kosher or halal — based on what's written on your menu. It compares your menu content against general industry information on common dietary restrictions, so a finding here reflects what's observable in your menu text, not a certification or compliance check.

The tool can assess your menu descriptions against general best practices for restaurant menu language, such as using specific, sensory detail and highlighting standout ingredients rather than generic wording. It compares the text of your own menu to this guidance to flag descriptions that may be underselling a dish — but it can't tell you whether a specific rewritten description would actually change how often that item sells, since that requires sales data the tool doesn't have.

Menu engineering helps operators optimize sales by sorting menu items by popularity and profit margin to help determine which items to feature prominently, which to promote, and which to get reworked or removed. Because Toast Menu Checker doesn't have your sales or other financial data, it can't calculate the popularity or profitability numbers a full matrix requires — but it can use the same underlying logic (placement, description strength, pricing presentation) to flag patterns worth checking against your own sales data.

Your report gives you a breakdown of findings you can act on based on your own knowledge and context, since the tool names gaps you may or may not want to address. For questions the report can't answer on its own — like projected impact on revenue — it will point you toward a conversation with the Toast team.