• Creating a Menu
• Building a Menu Cycle
• Digital Menus
• Accessing Your Menus
• Paper Menus
• Shopping Lists
• Publishing a Menu to Libro
• Meal Ordering (Food Industry)
• Meal Ordering (Clinical Setting)
• Scheduling Menus
• Tracking Menu Interaction
• Staff Area on Digital Menus (Clinical Setting)

Meal Ordering (Clinical Setting)

If you are interested in adding meal ordering to your Nutritics account, please contact sales@nutritics.com

This guide will show you:

• How to set up your outlet in Nutritics
• How to set up your patients profiles for meal ordering
• How to publish your existing menus and enable ordering the customer facing side of the ordering system
• Limiting items that can be ordered on a menu
• How to manage your orders in the orders dashboard
• Filtering orders in your Dashboard

If you have not already built up your menus in Nutritics, please see our guide on menu creation here.

If you have not already created a patient profile in Nutritics, please see our guide on this here.

Outlet Setup

To enable ordering on your account you must first set up your outlet on Nutritics.

• Search in the search bar and select your outlet from the list.
• Add in your outlet details.
• Set the width of your thermal paper rolls used for docket and receipt printing. Dockets and receipts can be printed from the orders dashboard.
• Tick the days that your outlet is open to take orders. If ordering is enabled on your menus, patients will only be able to order on days the outlet is open. Use the calendar to mark any holidays on which the outlet is closed. Patients will not be able to place orders for those days.

• Under the meal services heading, specify how your customers can receive their orders, e.g. bed service, pick up. 
• Choose how your outlet is set up i.e. beds and wards or rooms and floors. 
• If desired, share your outlet - type a Nutritics username or email address to enable sharing with the user. If your licences are part of an organisation or group, you will see all users of the organisation when you click ‘add user’. You can also choose to share with all account holders within the organisation. You will have the option to share the outlet with read only or read & write privileges after adding a collaborator.

Patient and room setup

• Set up the waiting staff, areas and tables. This information will be visible on ‘eat-in’ orders in the ordering dashboard.
• Set up the staff and beds/wards or rooms/floors. If desired, staff members can be assigned pin codes that they will need to enter to gain access to menus. If staff members log into a menu and then a patient orders from that menu, you will be able to see the staff member associated with the order in the orders dashboard.
  
  Specify the beds/wards or rooms/floors. 
  
  
  
  
  

Pro tip: A bed/room and ward/floor can be assigned to a patient in the patient profile.

When ordering a meal, the menu can be filtered by bed/room number and the patient’s dietary requirements including allergies* and texture grade requirements** will be taken into account and any unsuitable meal options will be removed from the menu.

*Allergies and other dietary preferences can be specified in the dietary preferences/allergies section of the patient profile. 

**If a patient is suffering from dysphagia, their texture grade requirements can be specified under the grouping section of the patient profile. 

Menu item texture grades can be tagged by opening a recipe, scrolling to the grouping section and clicking on the appropriate texture grade. 

Menu settings and publishing

Once the menus and the outlet have been set up, open the menu you would like to publish from the Nutritics content explorer and review the menu settings. If you have not already created your menus in Nutritics, please see our guide on menu creation here.

Display tab

Choose the information to be displayed on paper and digital menus

• Enable calories and allergen information, an ingredient list and front and back of pack nutrition information.
• Choose the look of the menu e.g. apply a light or dark theme and select how many menu items or ‘tiles’ are displayed in each line.
• Enter a disclaimer to be displayed on all menu items, or add a welcome message for your menu.

• Type in a welcome message/instructions to display to customers when the menu is loaded. Use the toolbar to format the text. Click on the picture frame icon to upload an image.

Interactivity tab 

Ordering tab

Enable ordering to allow patients to place orders from the digital menu. Orders will appear in the ‘Orders’ folder in the Nutritics content explorer.

• Enable card payments from this tab.
• Max advance orders per day: This allows orders to be booked for subsequent days. Define how many advance orders can be booked each day. 
• Min lead time: Set the minimum amount of time and order can be placed before it’s due i.e. the minimum lead time it will take the kitchen to produce an order for this menu. For example, if the lead time is set to 15 minutes and a patient tries to place an order at 3pm, the earliest ‘due time’ slot will be 3:15pm. 
  
  The lead time for orders can be controlled in 2 places: 

1) In the ordering tab of individual menu settings as described above. 

2) The minimum lead time can also be controlled by the kitchen in the live orders dashboard. 

Click on the meal service type e.g. bed service and use the plus or minus icons to edit the due time. Note the due time can only be increased here and cannot go below the due time set on an individual menu e.g if the lead time of a menu is set to 20 minutes but the kitchen is busy and needs more time to fulfill the orders, they could set the lead time from the dashboard to 30 minutes and this lead time will be applied. If the kitchen is quiet however and wants to decrease the lead time e.g. to 15 minutes, this would need to be changed in the individual menu settings. 

• Allow orders for specific meal/time slots: This should be used where meal times are at a set times e.g. breakfast is served at 8am, lunch is at 12pm and dinner at 6pm.
• Allow orders at custom times: Allows patients to choose their order ‘due time’ from automatically calculated time slots. Define how many orders the kitchen can handle in a set amount of time.
  
• This will determine the amount of due time slots that are visible to the customer when ordering from your menu.
 



• Set the default order type (this will be the first option shown to patients when selecting how they wish to receive their order).  
• Set the service operating hours for each order type (or leave this blank to accept orders at all times). 
• Set an optional fee for orders. Note that card payments will need to be enabled for this to work (scroll to the top of the ordering tab to enable payments).  
• Select what information is required from the patient e.g. name, address, phone number (this must be ticked to enabled SMS notification to patients that their order has been received).  

Notifications 

• Choose to be notified via email each time a new order is submitted. 
• Choose to send patients an SMS message confirming their order. Note you will need to collect patient phone numbers (enabled from the ordering tab of your menu settings) for this to work. 
• Send patients a confirmation email summarising their order. 
  

Publishing tab

Publish your menus to make them ‘live’ i.e. staff and patients can view and interactive with your menus on a digital display. 

• Staff login can be enabled from this tab. Staff members can be assigned pin codes that grant them access to menus. Pin codes can be assigned by clicking on the 'add users’ shortcut or from the outlet settings accessed by clicking on the cog icon in the top right corner of the screen.
• Enable order summary for staff to prompt an order review before placing
• Menus are made live from the publishing tab tab using the drop-down. Choose if the menu is published immediately or schedule a date and time for the menus to go live. Click here for more information on scheduling menus.

• Live menus have an orange circle beside the menu title in the Nutritics explorer and on the the digital button in the menu workspace.
• Click on the digital button to preview your digital menu.

Sharing tab

Choose how the menu will be accessed by patients in the ‘sharing’ tab. 

• Libro is an app designed to track diet, exercise and lifestyle goals. Libro users log their diet and exercise on the app and receive analysis reports and feedback from their nutrition professional directly to their phone. 
• Publish menus to Libro to allow Libro users to browse the menu on their smartphone Copy and paste the menu URL to display the menu on a website, on a tablet or other displays; embed the menu on a website using the code provided or display the QR code online or at an outlet for patients to scan. 
• To see your full menu list, click ‘get main menu url’. This will provide you with a link to a list of all active and inactive digital menus in your Nutritics account. 

Pro tip: You can insert '#' followed by a ward name at the end of your share link and bookmark. This will allow ward staff to open the menu directly showing their bed layout.

Menu templates

To apply a template, click on the template name and select apply. Right-click on the template name to set it as the default menu layout, to update the template or to rename or delete the template. 

Templates can be applied to an individual menu, a menu 'folder' group or all menus across your account by selecting the relevant option from the drop down shown above. 

Limiting items ordered on menus

To limit the amount of items that can be ordered from a menu, click on the monitors button from your menu workspace.

Patient view

If a menu is password protected, a staff member will be required to log in to see the menu.

Enter the pin assigned to the staff member in your outlet settings. 

Menu items are shown in a tile format.

Patients can click on the language dropdown at the top of the screen to translate the menu into their preferred language.

Patients can scroll through and filter the menu by clicking on the tabs along the top.

Patients can also filter by their dietary preferences and allergies by clicking on the drop-down menu at the top of the screen. Clicking on the ‘choose’ button allows for the selection of a specific ward/floor and bed/room. 

The patient’s dietary requirements including allergies and texture grade requirements will be taken into account and any unsuitable meal options will be removed from the menu.

Clicking on a menu item will open it (the information on display e.g. calories, pricing etc. can be controlled from the menu settings).

An order confirmation will show before confirming the order.

If payments are enabled, patients will be prompted to enter their card details to complete their order. 

Ordering via a patient's QR code

Choose the bed manually, or scan the unique QR code to load information:

Staff area

Control the minimum lead time for orders directly from the orders dashboard. Click on the due time and use the plus / minus icons to increase/decrease the lead time. This is useful for ensuring the kitchen is not overloaded with orders. 

Filtering Orders

Filter orders using the search bar at the top of the screen. Orders can be filtered by: 

• Due time 
• Date the order was placed or days offset e.g. days in advance, setting this to 0 will show today’s orders, setting this to 1 will show orders for tomorrow, setting it to 2 will show orders for 2 days time and so on
• Ward/floor and room/bed number 
• The menu the customer ordered from e.g. bar menu, main restaurant menu 
• Fluid and solid texture grades 
• Menu Staff member (if staff login is enabled on menus) 
• Order status e.g. pending, ready for collection 
• Meal groups e.g. breakfast, soups, salads 

Save commonly used searches by setting your search criteria and clicking ‘save’. Give the search a title. Saved searches appear to the left when the search dropdown is open.