Getting a recipe onto the line

A recipe reaches the line in three moves: someone writes it, someone approves it, and the stores running its menu see it.

Write it

Anyone from Creator upwards can create and edit a recipe. It stays a draft and is visible to your team, but never to the line, until it is published.

A recipe is editable while it is a draft and again once it is published. It is deliberately frozen while it is in review — including for brand admins — so that what an approver is looking at cannot change underneath them.

Send it for review

Submit for review puts the recipe in the approvals queue and asks for a note describing what changed. That note is shown to approvers and, once published, to the stores — so “swapped to the new supplier’s cut” is worth more than “update”.

A Creator only ever sees Submit for review. Publishing directly is not available to them, and that is the point: the person who wrote a recipe is not the only person who has looked at it before a cook follows it.

Approve it

Approvers see everything waiting in Approvals. The queue is a shared pool — there is no assigned approver, and any approver can decide any submission.

Approve & publish puts the recipe live immediately. Reject sends it back to draft with a note for the author.

Approvers and brand admins also get Publish now in the editor, which is the same thing as submitting and approving in one step.

One thing worth knowing: an approver may approve a recipe they wrote themselves. That is deliberate, not an oversight — a single-approver brand would otherwise be unable to publish anything. If you want a second pair of eyes enforced, give authoring to Creators and keep Approver for the people who should be checking.

What publishing actually does

Publishing takes a numbered snapshot — a revision — of the recipe. That snapshot is what the line reads, so later edits to the draft do not change what cooks are looking at until you publish again.

It also:

• puts the recipe on every menu it belongs to, at every store running that menu
• marks it NEW on the line until somebody reads it
• queues translations, if you have more than one language enabled

If nothing appears on the line

Publishing is only half of it. A recipe reaches a viewer when all of these are true:

1. the recipe is published
2. it is an item on a menu version that is currently running
3. the store has been given access to that menu

The third is the one people miss, because it lives on the store rather than on the menu — open Locations → Stores & devices, choose the store, and check the menu under Menu access. The menu page will also warn you when a store is scheduled to run a menu its viewers cannot open.