In this article we are going to cover our new Option Groups.
Option groups are our brand new way to handle product options versus our old modifier structure. They provide easier management of options across many products, as well as the ability to nest options within other options (we call that "Linking").
If you're interested in Option Groups, please reach out to your dedicated customer success manager to discuss turning them on for your location.
Option Group Scenarios
Side Add On Option w/ Linked Option
Ingredient Removal List
Variant Option Groups
Option Group and Product Option Editing
Intro to Option Groups
To add any new Option Groups once turned on for your location, navigate to your Product Catalog and toggle over to Options--Add New Option Group.
We are then brought to this screen where we input our option group details.
Group Details
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- Option Group Name: The name as it will show in your manager dashboard. This is a good place to be specific for better backend option group management. In our above example, we may end up with 5 different sets of option groups that are size based but they're different sizes for different products. Rather than just naming it "Size", we name it Draft Beer Size for easy recognition when coming to our options groups exactly what this option group is. If we didn't do that, we could easily end up with multiple similarly named option groups so this is a good place to be specific and then use the display name to display a basic size name to your guests and in the POS/KDS.
- Display Name: This is what your guests see and what you see in the POS and KDS (shown in KDS if you have "Show Modifier Names" toggled on in your KDS settings).
- Short Name: This is the name that will show on printed chits.
Group Settings
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- Status: We set our option group as enabled, 86d or disabled .
- Total Selections: This is where we set a minimum/maximum set of choices. A minimum of 1 and maximum of 1 is how we set an option to be required. In the above example, we have our beer size option set to min 1 and max 1 so a guest is forced to choose one and only one option.
- Autofill: This feature is a count the total number of options within the group and allows for a single click to autofill that number for a min or max selection.
Adding Options
On the righthand side is where we add the choices within each option group. We'll cover bulk linking and any linking of options later.
Add our option choices in the "New Option Name" field. You can simply hit ENTER rather than having to actually manually click Add +, for faster option entry. As always with options, remember to hit save and submit any changes we make to an individual option or entire options group.
Single Selection Option Group
In our single option select video above, we show an instance where you would have a single selection option such as Meat Temperature for a steak with no additional prices added to those options. It's also what we showed in our intro section where our min/max are set to 1. Single option selection scenarios are cases where there is never, or virtually never, a case where you would want a guest to select more than one option on the product, such as:
- Size for beverages, pizzas etc.
- Dressing for a salad
- Bread option for a sandwich
Multi Selection Option
A multi selection option can be something like a Taco Plate where it's 3 tacos to a plate and you need to select multiple options, as well as to be able to select multiples of a single option.
In our example below, we created a Taco Plate options group and added the various taco options a guest can choose from. We set a min of 3 and a max of 3 which says the guest must choose 3 tacos. By clicking the down arrow on each option, we toggled on the additional setting of "Allow Duplicates" which means that we're saying that multiples of this option can be selected. In a taco plate, someone may want 1 Carnitas, 1 Carne Asada and 1 Al Pastor, or they may just simply want 3 Al Pastor tacos. If allow duplicates is left off, you're then only able to pick 1 of each variety up to our maximum set in total selection, which for our example above, is 3.
Our options groups come with this Preview option. This allow us to click the options as a guests would in the ordering flow without having to actually scan into a menu. Here, we show in green that 3 of 3 selections have been made, comprised of 2 Al Pastor tacos and 1 Carnitas taco. We're able to add 2 Al Pastor taco because of the previously mentioned "Allow Duplicates" setting was toggled on for each option within our Taco Plates options group.
Side Add On Option Group w/ Linked Option
Our side add on video here is very similar to what we show in our intro for side options as an options group but we also now start to incorporate pricing of options and linking of option groups.
To add a price to an option, we click our down arrow on the specific option within our option group and add a price and save our change(s). For our example below, now when a guest chooses French Fries as their sandwich side, we are charging an additional $1 for that option.
Now looking at our side options, we see that we have a side of baby greens. With this side of baby greens, we would like our guests to choose their salad dressing. How do we do that?
First we make our our Salad Dressing options group with the various dressing options. For our Salad Dressing Option, we set our min to 1 and max 1. To get to the dressing selection, you have to click the Baby Greens option. If we don't set our Salad Dressing Option as required (min 1), then we would be able to place an order for Baby Greens with no option selected for a dressing. This would be confusing for servers, as well as the kitchen, so it is always good to keep in mind "Should I be required to make a selection for this option?"
Now we go back to our Sandwich Sides option group and click the down arrow on Baby Greens--Link Option Groups.
This will bring up our bank of option groups we've created and the option group we want to link to. For our purposes here, we're selecting our Salad Dressing Options and clicking Select Option Groups at the bottom.
You will now see that there is a linked option group. Ours here is the Baby Greens option.
Note: Be sure to click save changes before exiting. Changes are not saved until you click Save Changes. 
We can preview our Sandwich Sides option group and click through Baby Greens to see that we have linked our Dressing option to the Baby Greens option.
Notice the arrow to the right of the Baby Greens option. This indicates that there is another selection to be made if we choose Baby Greens as our Sandwich Side option.
Ingredient Add Master List
In our add ingredient master list scenario, we're looking at situations where we have commonly shared ingredients/additions shared across multiple items.
Below we have already created a Sandwich Additions options group with the various additional options available to add to our sandwiches.
As shown previously, once created, you can apply an option group to entire categories. Here we select the categories and click submit.
Now we have our sandwich additions options group shared to our two sandwich categories, but what if I don't want a single option within an options group to apply on a specific product but the rest of the options I do? You don't need to create an entirely separate set of option groups, but rather adjustments can be made individually at the product level.
Below, we have a toasted pesto chicken sandwich. This sandwich is dropped on a panini press. Warm lettuce equals wilted lettuce so we don't even want to give our guests the option to add lettuce to our chicken sandwich. We can click into our options for this product and click the pencil icon to edit the options.
We can hover over the green dot on the far right of our option to enable/86 or disable an option then click Save Changes. We've now gone ahead and disabled our lettuce option only on this pesto chicken product. We're not out of lettuce for all products this option is attached to, but rather we want to limit lettuce from being added to this specific product.
Ingredient Remove Master List
An ingredient remove list is very much the same concept as adding, but rather something we may want to remove. One such use-case would be for salads where you may have many shared ingredients across all of your salads and rather than having an open text field that is harder to read for your kitchen staff, it is easier to create an options group named in a way where guests know they are removing the option(s) from whatever it is they are ordering.
Variant Option Groups
Variants allow us to create a seamless ordering experience where there may be multiple where multiple choices must be made to order a single product, as well as within each choice, there are different inventory levels to track. In the video and what we'll show below, we use merchandise as an example. Merchandise often comes in various sizes, and within each size, you may have many different colors or styles to choose from within that size. Each style/color has its own inventory level that contributes to your overall inventory per size. For example, we may have 100 small-t shirts but it may be that we have 95 small black t-shirts 3 grey t-shirts and 2 white t-shirts making up that overall 100. Variants allows us to handle the inventory on such products.
Very similar to the video, we're adding a T Shirt Sizes and Colors variant group. Within this group, we will have a variant for the size of the t shirt, as well as the color. Below we've already added our sizes and now within this T Shirt Sizes and Colors variant group, we're going to add a new variant group. This will allow us to also have to choose a color, as well as a size on our t shirts.
We added our colors and now we see when clicking the drop down arrow on our T Shirt Sizes variant group that we now see that there is both a size and color option to choose for a t shirt.
For a guest ordering, we now see here that we have selected our small size on the t-shirt, denoted with the green 1/1 icon, but we still must choose our color option to accompany the small t-shirt option we already chose.
Now that we have our sizes/colors added and we see it looks as it's supposed to within the ordering flow, let's adjust some prices and stock levels on our t-shirt. Any prices and stock levels are not set on the overall variant group level that we just created, but rather you must set them at the individual product level, just the same as we always have with variants.
If we wanted to set prices differently per variant, then we can do so by toggling over to Variant Details. For our purposes, we are selling all of our shirts for $20 regardless of size/color so we just set a base price of $20 on our t-shirt. If we instead wanted to set the price on each variant, we could set our base price of our t-shirt to $0 and then set our prices here within Variant Details.
When managing the stock, you can individually add additional stock on a per variant basis or for our case here, we're saying we got a fresh restock of 25 each so we can use the bulk edit at the top to quickly add 25 of each in one fell swoop.
Option Group and Product Option Editing