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Competitor menus — what they sell and what they charge

If your carbonara is ฿285 and the place across the square charges ฿340, that’s worth knowing before your next print run — and if theirs moved from ฿310 last fortnight, you want that surfaced rather than remembered.

The rule

The system never invents a price. If a dish has no price printed, it stays blank. Everything shown came from a source you can point at.

Three ways in

Open Growth → Competitors → a competitor → Menu & pricing. Under each button, helper text tells you what’s actually available before you click.

  • Try their website — best when they have a real menu page. Pages that are just links to PDFs work too; up to six get followed. Flat 10 credits.
  • Try Google menu photos — a customer photo Google tagged as a menu. Free.
  • Upload yourself — a PDF or up to five phone photos, read as one menu. Always works, and right for printed multi-page menus.

15–30 seconds later the dishes appear, in their categories and their order.

Reading the badge

The header says where the data came from and how old it is — “from their website · read today”, or “from a Google menu photo · photo from 8 months ago”. Past a year, an amber warning tells you to verify before pricing off it.

What happens when you refresh

Nothing is wiped — your dish list builds up over time:

  • Same price — nothing changes.
  • Different price — an amber badge shows the move (“฿310 → ฿340 · 2 weeks ago”), fading after three months. Amber for a rise, emerald for a drop.
  • Not found this time — the dish dims with Not in latest scan. Not deleted; maybe your photos missed a page, maybe they retired it.

What gets read from a drinks list

A wine printed as “320 by the glass, 1550 by the bottle” is stored as both prices, not one. Each drink also gets its type (wine, beer, cocktail, mocktail, spirit) and, where the menu prints it, the grape or style — Chardonnay, IPA, Gin.

That’s what lets a comparison be honest: your Chardonnay against their Chardonnay, glass price against glass price. Before this, only the cheaper number was kept and the rest sat in the description, so a bottle price could be compared against a glass one.

Menus read before this update show the old, flatter detail. Re-scan a competitor to pick up the richer reading.

Set menus

A fixed-price menu — “Set Lunch 390, two courses” — is read as a bundle, with its courses listed underneath. The courses have no price of their own, because on the real menu they don’t either.

Compare bundles on price per course: 390 for two courses is dearer per course than 489 for three.

Good to know

  • A drink listed by both glass and bottle isn’t a price change, and won’t be badged as one.
  • A website is re-read about once a month. Asking again sooner returns the read you already have.
  • Your uploads show on your tab immediately.

Set menus

A fixed-price menu shows on the Set menu · Specials tab with its base price, how many courses that buys, the price per course, and any paid extras — “+99 for a third course”, “+79 free-flow water per person”.

The individual dishes are still dishes, so they stay on the Food tab. The card tells you how many were captured.

Seeing it side by side

Growth → Analytics → Menu & pricing lines your prices up against every competitor you track, grouped by type — your wine against their wine, your beer against their beer. Drinks sold by the glass and by the bottle are shown on separate lines, never averaged together.

Set menus are listed by price per course, so a ฿390 two-course lunch and a ฿489 three-course one can actually be compared. It costs nothing to look.