The menu-health check
The menu-health check is a daily, deterministic review of what you're about to cook and whether the menu is in good shape. It's not a vibe check — it's a battery of five small tests that flag specific problems, with the suggested fixes in the same screen.
You run it from Menu → Health check (or /admin/menu-health in the app). It looks at the next 7 and 14 days of menus at your campus and reports findings.
The five checks
| Check | What it flags |
|---|---|
| Dish repetition | A recipe scheduled too many times in the window (e.g., the same chicken dish on lunch every day for a week) |
| Category stale | An entire category (soup, sides) that hasn't been scheduled recently — diners get tired of the same shapes |
| Daypart empty | A scheduled daypart has nothing assigned (e.g., Wednesday late-night shows zero entrées) |
| Cost outlier | A recipe whose plate cost has jumped unexpectedly — usually because vendor pricing changed, occasionally because someone changed a quantity |
| Use-it-up | Stock above 2× par that no menu currently cooks in the next 14 days — money sitting on the shelf |
Each finding shows the relevant recipes, the suggested fix (which meals to consider rotating in, which items to expect to order more of), and a direct link to the menu editor for the affected daypart.
How to read the output
The output is a list of flags, each one clickable. Inside a flag you see:
- What the test found — the specific symptom in plain language
- The evidence — the menus, recipes, or stock counts that triggered it
- Suggested actions — concrete next steps (rotate this recipe into the Thursday lunch slot, drop par for these items, etc.)
- Mark resolved — dismiss the flag for the current scheduling window if you've already decided the symptom is intentional
Nothing about this is automatic. PrepTable does not rewrite your menus; it tells you what's wrong and lets you decide.
Why this matters
Two of the five checks — dish repetition and use-it-up — correspond to market-whitespace gaps that no other campus-dining back-of-house tool ships. Repetition is the kind of thing managers notice eventually but don't catch in time; use-it-up is the kind of thing managers don't notice at all until the waste report shows the number. Running the health check once a week surfaces both before they become service problems.
The cost-outlier check is the highest-leverage of the five for a busy week. A single price change at your produce vendor last Tuesday will show up here as a flagged recipe the next time you check, with the new vendor price visible inline.
When to run it
The recommended cadence is once a week, on the same day, before you finalize next week's menus. A Monday-morning check before the Tuesday menu build catches both the use-it-up items from last week and the repetition risk in next week.
You can also run it ad-hoc after a major event ("did we use up Friday's leftover pulled pork?") or after a vendor-pricing change.
Where it lives in the app
The check is at Menu → Health check in the left-side navigation, under the Menu group. Admins and campus managers (for their assigned campuses) can run it; floor staff cannot, since the action items touch menu state.
Where to go next
- Par levels & low-stock alerts — for the stock side of the same workflow
- Overview — orientation