How to show allergens and sell extras

Allergens, calories and ingredients — the details a diner asks the waiter about — and how to sell a side with a main.

These are the extra fields that make a dish page useful rather than decorative. Shopify calls them metafields. You set them up once, and from then on they are just boxes on your product page.

Setting them up, once #

In Shopify: Settings → Custom data → Products → Add definition

Make these four. Copy the name and the type exactly — the theme looks for these and nothing else.

Name it	Namespace and key	Type	Shows up as
Allergens	restrovics.allergens	Single line text, list	An Allergens row on the dish page
Calories	restrovics.calories	Integer	A Calories row
Ingredients	restrovics.ingredients	Single line text, list	An Ingredients row
Extras	restrovics.add_ons	Product, list	Paid add-ons on the dish page

The namespace is the bit before the dot

When Shopify asks for a namespace and key, the namespace is restrovics and the key is allergens. There is one box for each.

Leave any of them empty on a dish and that row simply does not appear. There is no need to fill in all four for every dish.

Filling them in #

Once the definitions exist, open any dish and scroll to the bottom. There is a Metafields panel with your four boxes in it.

Example — Truffle arancini

Allergens: Milk, Egg, Gluten
Calories: 420
Ingredients: Arborio rice, black truffle, parmesan, panko

On the dish page these become three tidy rows under the price, each with its own small icon.

Selling extras #

An extra is a side, a sauce, an extra shot — something a diner adds to a dish and pays for.

Each extra is its own product. That is deliberate: an extra has its own price and the kitchen needs to see it as its own line on the ticket.

1. Create the extra as a product, exactly as you would a dish. Give it a title and a price.
2. Do not put it in any of your course collections. Otherwise it appears in your menu as though it were a dish.
3. Open the dish it belongs with, find the Extras metafield, and choose it there. You can choose several.

The dish page then offers them as tick boxes, and the running total at the bottom updates as the diner ticks them.

Example

Steak frites lists three extras — Peppercorn sauce +£2.50, Truffle butter +£3.00, Extra frites +£4.00. A diner ticking sauce and frites sees the total change from £24.00 to £30.50 before they add anything to their order.

Notes for the kitchen #

Every dish page has a Special instructions box, so a diner can ask for something without ringing you. It arrives with the order. Nothing to set up.

Reviews and stars #

The theme shows star ratings wherever a dish has them. It reads them from whichever review app you install — Judge.me, Loox, Okendo and Yotpo all work, and there is nothing to connect up.

Why a new dish has no stars

A dish with no reviews yet shows nothing at all, rather than five empty stars. Five empty stars reads as badly reviewed, which is worse than saying nothing.