Restaurant & Food

In Turkey, allergen disclosure has been mandatory since 1 January 2020

Restaurants, cafes, canteens, school and hospital kitchens all fall under the Turkish Food Codex Regulation on Food Labelling and Consumer Information, published on 26 January 2017. Since 1 January 2020 these mass catering businesses must disclose allergen information to the end consumer, covering the 14 allergens listed in Annex-1, on menus, posters or information boards so that guests are informed before they order (source: Republic of Türkiye Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry, Güvenilir Gıda portal).

Most restaurant software gets this wrong in the same way: allergens are stored as a free-text note on the menu item. That breaks the moment anything changes. Model it as structured data instead:

• Allergens belong to the ingredient, not the dish. A dish inherits the union of its ingredients' allergens, so swapping one supplier updates every dish that uses it.
• Keep a "may contain" flag separate from "contains". Shared fryers and shared prep surfaces are a real risk and a real liability, and they are not the same statement.
• Every surface that shows a menu has to read from the same source: the printed menu, the QR menu, the website and the delivery platform listing. A second, hand-maintained list will drift within weeks.

With delivery platforms, the order state machine is the product

Connecting to a delivery marketplace is rarely the hard part. Keeping the kitchen and the platform in agreement is. Design for these cases before you write the first endpoint:

1. Acceptance window. Platforms expect an accept or reject decision quickly. If your kitchen display is behind a slow network call, orders auto-cancel and your rating drops for a reason that has nothing to do with the food.
2. Stock-outs travel in one direction only. When an item runs out, it has to disappear from every channel within seconds. Recovering an item can be slower; removing it cannot.
3. Idempotency on every webhook. Platforms retry. A retried "order created" event must not print a second ticket in the kitchen.
4. Partial refunds and item-level cancellations. These are the states teams forget, and they are the ones accounting asks about at month end.

Do not let the point-of-sale and the delivery integration hold separate menus. One catalogue, many channels. Two catalogues means two sources of truth, and the cheaper one to maintain always wins by neglect.

What a restaurant software project actually costs

Scope is driven by the number of integrations, not by the number of tables. Our estimation engine prices work at 300-400 USD per person-day:

Testing, project management and infrastructure never exceed 25% of the total in our estimates, and deployment plus CI/CD is a fixed 3-6 day line item. We do not quote single phases above 160 person-days; larger programmes are split into releases.

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