Guests ask for calories now, whether or not the law requires you to print them. A laminated card with a kcal column from last spring answers the question for one week. After the recipe changes, it answers a different question than the one they asked.
Nutrition on a Quiteful menu lives on the dish: calories, protein, carbohydrates, sugar, fat, saturated fat, fibre and salt, per portion and per 100g.
Who has to show calories
In England, the calorie labelling rules for food sold out of home apply to large businesses — generally those with 250 or more employees — selling non-prepacked food and drink. The figure is kilocalories, shown at the point of choice, with the reference that adults need around 2,000 kcal a day. Smaller venues, and businesses elsewhere in the UK, are often outside that duty. Many still publish the numbers because guests look for them, and because a group with one large site and several small ones does not want two standards.
If you are in scope, a PDF that you forget to replace is not a defence. The number on the table has to match the dish you are selling today. That is the same discipline as allergen information, which we covered in what FSA allergen guidance means for your menu.
Put the numbers where the order is decided
Out of the box, each dish can carry the fields guests look up. Set a portion size and Quiteful calculates per-portion and per-100g values. Guests can filter the menu by calorie range instead of asking the floor to guess which salads are "light". Dietary tags such as low calorie sit alongside that filter. They are labels, not a substitute for the figure.
Drinks belong in the same picture. A cocktail can outrun a main course, and a beer is not calorie-free because it lives on a separate card. Allergens on drinks menus is the sister problem; nutrition is the other half.
Labels, pages and other systems
A single dish can produce a nutrition label PDF when you need something printable. Each dish can also have a public nutrition page — useful when a QR code on packaging should open the numbers, not a screenshot in a camera roll.
If a delivery partner or another catalogue needs the same data, it is available as JSON through the API. You are not retyping kcal into a third spreadsheet. The recipe remains the record, which is the argument in one recipe record.
What the numbers are not
A calorie figure is not a health claim, and a low-calorie tag is not a promise about allergens. Keep those jobs apart. Nutrition data also does not certify itself: someone at the venue still owns the source figures, the portion size and the decision to publish. Quiteful stores and displays them with the dish so they move when the menu moves.
A practical next step
Start with the dishes people actually ask about — the mains, the kids' menu, the cocktails — and publish kcal and salt before you chase a perfect macro on every garnish. If the law applies to you, make sure the point-of-choice surface is the live menu guests open, not a PDF in the media library.
See nutrition tracking, or read how dietary tags let guests narrow the same menu.