Features are grouped into three categories:

Menus are managed per location. Attributes — pricing, availability, items offered — can vary across locations of the same brand. For pricing differences across locations, ensure your approach complies with ezCater’s menu requirements.

Categories group items together on the menu.

The fundamental unit of an ezCater menu. Items support:

Options are modifier groups within an item; choices are the individual selections within an option. Supported features include:

The integration supports tag-driven behavior across food labeling, item type, choice type, and unit of measure. See the Tag Reference for the canonical inventory.

A required configuration on every food item. Supports free and paid patterns. See Utensils for the full setup.

These are supported but require specific setup. Each links to a dedicated reference page.

For items offered in multiple sizes that share the same modifier structure (Small / Medium / Large of the same dish). The size group requires IsSelectionSizeGroup = T and structural matching across sizes. See Sized-Based Items.

For items whose price lives at the option level rather than the item level (a “Boxed Lunch” with three priced choice options). Requires a specific structural setup on the priced option group. See Menu Setup Guide.

The LeadTime tag overrides store-level lead time for items that need longer prep. Accepted values are minutes, drawn from a defined list of whole-hour values between 5 and 72 hours. See Lead Times.

Olo-side controls for restricting categories or items to ezCater. Use when you have ezCater-specific categories or items that shouldn’t appear on your other ordering channels. See Rails Visibility.

A dedicated channel for recurring subscription-style ordering, separate from on-demand Marketplace. Requires its own tagging via RelishChannel. See Meal Program Overview.

The patterns below are not supported today. Each has a recommended workaround.

ezCater does not currently honor time-of-day restrictions on specific items (for example, “breakfast burritos only available 8–10am”).

Workaround: add the availability window to the item description (for example, “Only available from 8am to 10am”). This will not prevent customers from adding the item to their cart outside the window, but it sets expectations.

ezCater treats items added to your menu as highly available and stable. Items aren’t designed to be temporarily disabled.

Workaround: items marked inactive or not sent to ezCater’s menu won’t be available for ordering. Use this for both short-term outages and long-term unavailability.

Light 86’ing is available specifically when participating in the Menus API. Confirm with your ezCater contact whether your integration supports it.

A customer can’t add multiple quantities of a single modifier choice within one item (for example, “4 turkey sandwiches, 5 ham sandwiches, 1 hummus sandwich” inside one platter). Fixed-count and up-to-count selections are supported using minimum and maximum settings on the option group:

Workaround: When the goal is multiple quantities of one option, use option groups named to represent each selection slot instead: “Select First Sandwich,” “Select Second Sandwich,” and so on. This is verbose but functional.

A choice can open a single sub-choice underneath it — for example, a “Choose sandwich” option whose “Grilled cheese” choice opens a “Toasted?” sub-choice. Nesting past that first level is not supported and causes menu ingestion failures — the “Toasted?” sub-choice cannot itself open a “Cut in half?” choice.

Workaround for deeper structures: expand the choice list to include the full combination. Instead of a sub-choice that opens a further picker, list “House Salad with Ranch,” “House Salad with Italian,” and “Spinach Salad with Italian” as discrete choices.

An item priced at $0 will not appear on the ezCater marketplace.

Workaround: determine a base price for the item and use options for any variations. If an item’s price varies by selection, use the zero-dollar parent item pattern, which is a different concept — zero-dollar parents have prices on their options.

A choice cannot decrease the price of an item (no “minus $2 for no protein” style modifiers).

Workaround: create a separate item at the lower price. For example, instead of a “no protein, save $2” choice, list a vegetarian variant of the dish at the lower price as its own item.