Setting up a café menu with sizes and add-ons, without a messy price list

The menu board of a karak shop or a specialty café looks short: karak, latte, cappuccino, iced latte, a few sandwiches and parottas. On the till it can become a mess. "Latte large oat milk", "Latte medium oat milk", "Latte large vanilla" — owners who create a product for every combination end up with hundreds of tiles, a price list nobody can update, and sales reports that split one drink into thirty lines.

The fix is to separate what the customer orders (a latte) from how they want it (large, oat milk, extra shot). This article shows how.

Products, sizes and add-ons

Think of three layers:

1. The product: Latte. One tile, one line in your sales report.
2. A required choice: the size. Small, medium or large, each with its own price or a price difference. The cashier must pick one.
3. Optional extras: extra shot (+3), oat milk (+2), vanilla syrup (+2), sugar level (normal, less, none, at no charge). The cashier may pick several, or none.

Set the groups once on the product, and every time it is rung up the till asks the same questions in the same order.

Rules that keep the counter fast

• Put the most common choice first. If 70 % of karak is regular size and normal sugar, those are the defaults and the cashier taps once.
• Keep groups short. Five syrups fit on one row of buttons; fifteen do not.
• Free choices still matter. "Less sugar" and "no ice" cost nothing but go on the kitchen ticket so the drink is made right.
• Name options the way the barista reads them. "Oat" on a ticket is enough; "Oat milk alternative (barista edition)" is not.

What prints where

• The receipt shows the drink, the size and the paid extras with their prices, so the customer sees what they paid for.
• The kitchen or bar ticket (or the kitchen screen) shows every option, free ones included, in large type.
• The customer display shows the same lines as the receipt while the cashier rings them up.

Sales reports you can read

Because "Latte" is one product, the report tells you how many lattes you sold this week, in one line, while each receipt still shows exactly how every drink was made. A list of thirty "latte" products answers neither question well.

Stock and cost

Sizes and add-ons are also where your food cost hides. A large latte uses more milk than a small one; an oat milk add-on uses a carton of oat milk, not of dairy. If you track ingredients, link each size and add-on to what it uses. Our article on food cost and recipes shows how to start with the ten best sellers rather than the whole menu.

Prices with VAT

In the UAE most cafés show prices with 5 % VAT included. Set the till to "VAT included" so the price on the board, the button and the receipt total are the same number, and the VAT amount is printed separately.

Bring the same menu to the table and the screen

Once the menu is built in layers, it can be reused: the online menu and table QR ordering ask the guest the same size and add-on questions, and menu boards on a TV show the same prices without retyping.

A one-afternoon plan

1. List your drinks and the questions each one needs.
2. Create the option groups (size, milk, syrup, sugar, ice).
3. Attach them to the products, or to the category.
4. Ring up your ten most common orders as a test and read the ticket.
5. Fix the order of the buttons, then open.

In CreekPOS

Sizes and add-ons are part of the Restaurant plan of CreekPOS Online, and the desktop program has them too (pricing shows which edition): set them per product, print them on the receipt and the kitchen ticket, and see them on the kitchen screen. See sizes and add-ons in the manual and the café and restaurant page.