A menu is not a package, and the difference surprises people

The allergen labeling requirement above applies to packaged food. A restaurant menu is a different document under a different rule, and the rule that governs it federally is about calories rather than allergens.

Chain restaurants are covered. A covered establishment is a restaurant or similar retail food establishment that is part of a chain with twenty or more locations. Those locations must do business under the same name and offer substantially the same menu items. Smaller establishments may register voluntarily.3

For those establishments the requirements are exact. Calorie content appears adjacent to the name or the price of each standard menu item, in type no smaller than the name or the price, whichever is smaller. Two statements are mandatory and their wording is fixed. One reads: 2,000 calories a day is used for general nutrition advice, but calorie needs vary. The other reads: Additional nutrition information available upon request. Both must appear prominently and clearly, in type matching the smallest calorie declaration on that menu, in a color and against a contrast at least as conspicuous as the calorie figures.3

What that means for the person writing the menu

Three categories of text sit on one page, and they are edited under three different rules.

The first is prescribed wording, which behaves the way it does on a regulated label. The two succinct statements have a form set by regulation, and a version improved for rhythm is a defect.3 The same is true of a Contains statement on any packaged item the establishment sells.2

The second is regulated data. Calorie figures, their placement, and their type size are specified, and an editor's job with them is placement and conformance rather than phrasing.3

The third is everything else: dish names, descriptions, provenance notes, and the language a kitchen uses to describe what it does. That is ordinary editable prose, and it sits inches from text that is not.

Keeping those three apart, on the page and in the file, is itself a piece of editorial work. It is also the thing most often lost when a menu is redesigned.

The consistency problem is the expensive one

A restaurant describes the same dish in more places than anyone tracks: the printed menu, the menu board, the website, a delivery platform, a specials insert, and an allergen matrix kept in the kitchen. A dish reformulated once and updated in four of those six leaves two documents describing a dish that no longer exists.

That is a consistency failure rather than a writing failure, and it is precisely what copy editing covers. Editors Canada defines the work to include checking for and correcting errors and inconsistencies, checking mechanical consistency, and building the record that holds decisions steady across a family of documents.4

An editor can produce that record. Every dish name, in every document, with the version each one carries, gathered in one place. Nobody enjoys compiling it, and it is the single artifact that keeps the six documents saying the same thing.

Where an editor stops

An editor does not determine which allergens a dish contains, whether a preparation is cross-contact free, whether a calorie figure is correct, or how it was calculated. Those determinations belong to the operator and to whoever performed the analysis, and they arrive with the copy.

Everything a client sends is treated in confidence, including recipes, supplier information, and analysis reports. EditFast works on menus and hospitality copy and on product labels and packaging, reporting what does not conform to the specification supplied.

The useful brief for this work names three things: which text is prescribed, which figures are regulated, and where else each dish is described. A brief that supplies all three gets a menu that agrees with itself, and with the five other documents describing the same food.

None of the three is expensive to assemble. All three are expensive to reconstruct after a redesign, which is when the reconstruction usually gets attempted.