What is menu sync? Zayos on the one-menu rule
Published July 2026 · Updated July 26, 2026
Menu sync is the process that pushes one master menu, its items, prices, modifiers and availability, out to every channel a restaurant sells on, and pulls sold-out changes back. Update the master once and the delivery apps, the website and the register all match.
Curious whether your menus already disagree with each other? The free AI report reads your public menus in about 60 seconds. No card.
What actually syncs, and what quietly does not?
Vendors say everything syncs. In practice one column below is dependable and the other is a list of things to verify by hand before you trust a Friday to it.
Travels reliably
- Item names and descriptions
- Base prices
- Availability, including 86ing an item mid-service
- Category order and section names
- Store hours and holiday closures
- Whether an item is orderable at all
Check before you assume
- Photos. Most marketplaces hold their own image library and apply their own crop and quality rules. Budget for uploading images per channel.
- Channel-specific pricing. A markup that covers commission on the apps should not follow the item onto your own site. Good sync tools treat that as a rule, not a mistake to correct.
- Modifier logic. Required versus optional, minimum and maximum selections, and free versus paid add-ons are modeled differently on each platform. This is where sync breaks most often.
- Promotions and item-level discounts. Usually configured inside each marketplace and invisible to the master menu, which is how an item ends up on promotion in one place and not another.
- Prep times and age-gated flags. Alcohol, tobacco and long-lead catering items carry per-platform rules. Assume nothing, and test one item before you trust the batch.
What does it cost when the menu does not sync?
Menu sync sounds like housekeeping until you price the four ways it fails. None of these are hypothetical; they are the reasons the feature exists.
The 86 that did not travel
The kitchen runs out of lamb at 7:15 and marks it sold out. One channel does not get the message. Three more lamb orders come in, a driver is already dispatched for one of them, and every one of those tickets ends in a refund and an apology.
What it costs: A refunded $46 ticket is not a $46 loss, it is $46 plus the food already fired, plus a driver fee, plus a rating that follows the store for months.
Price drift between channels
Most operators price marketplace menus higher to survive commission. When one channel misses the update, the higher price never lands and the kitchen sells at the direct price while paying app rates.
What it costs: A $14 item marked to $18 for the apps returns $12.60 at 30% commission. Left at $14 it returns $9.80. That is $2.80 an order, quietly, until somebody notices.
Modifier mismatch
Extra sauce is a paid modifier on your own site and a free one on an app, or a required choice on one channel is optional on another. The cook gets a ticket that does not say which.
What it costs: Small per order, constant across every order, and it teaches the line not to trust what is printed. That trust is the expensive part.
The item that lives on one channel only
A weekend special goes up on the website and never reaches the apps, or a legacy item nobody sells is still orderable on a marketplace nobody checks.
What it costs: Either a special that does not sell, or a dish the kitchen stopped making showing up on a Saturday ticket. Both are avoidable with one audit a week.
How do you keep one master menu in a real kitchen?
Menu sync is half software and half house rule. The software can only propagate a change it was told about, so the discipline decides whether it works. Four rules cover almost all of it.
- 01 One system is the truth. Pick where the master menu lives and never edit a menu inside a marketplace dashboard again. Two masters is the same as none.
- 02 86 from the line, not the office. The person who sees the last portion leave should be the person who marks it sold out, on the tablet in front of them, in one tap.
- 03 Change prices before service, then verify on one channel. Push, wait, open the app as a diner, look at the item. Thirty seconds of checking beats a shift of selling at the old price.
- 04 Audit once a week. Open every channel as a customer on a slow Tuesday. You are looking for orphan items, wrong prices and photos of a dish you stopped making in March.
Where the menu physically travels through, an order aggregator or the point of sale system, matters less than having exactly one place a change starts.
Where Zayos fits
Zayos treats the storefront menu as the master and cascades changes out through Otter to the marketplaces and the point of sale system, so an item marked sold out on the kitchen tablet stops being orderable everywhere. Per-channel pricing stays a rule rather than a correction, which is what lets a marketplace markup exist without leaking onto the restaurant’s own site.
What connects to what is listed on integrations, the menu build step is covered in how it works, and the shorter definition of the same idea sits in the operator glossary under menu cascade.
Menu sync, five straight answers.
What is menu sync for restaurants?
How long does a menu change take to show up on DoorDash or Uber Eats?
Can I charge different prices on the delivery apps than on my own site?
What does 86ing an item mean, and does it sync?
Do menu photos sync between channels?
Do your menus agree with each other?
The free AI report reads your public menus and flags what it finds, in about 60 seconds. No card, no call.
More definitions in the operator glossary.