Menu data methodology

1. Source priority

We check sources in this order and prefer the highest-ranked one available:

1. Official restaurant website
2. Official online ordering system
3. Official restaurant app, where accessible
4. Official nutrition PDF
5. Official allergen documentation
6. Official press or media resources
7. Official restaurant location pages
8. Other reliable first-party documentation

Third-party menu-listing sites are never used as a primary source for prices, calories, or nutrition figures.

2. What we record per item

For every menu item we try to capture, where officially available:

category, name, description, size or quantity, price, price location, calories or calorie range, serving size, included components, drink or sauce quantity, servings (for group items), full nutrition breakdown, allergens, availability notes, source URL, and the date we last checked it.

3. If we can't verify it, we don't publish it

We never invent a price, calorie count, ingredient, serving size, or nutrition value to complete a row in a table. If a figure can't be confirmed from an official source, it's marked unavailable or left out — it isn't estimated or backfilled from a competitor site.

4. How we handle prices

Most national restaurant chains don't publish one price list for the whole country — pricing is often set per restaurant, and shown only after you pick a specific location in the ordering flow. When a restaurant does this, we say so directly on its page instead of publishing a single number that wouldn't hold up at most locations. When we do display a price, we record the exact restaurant location and the date it was checked, next to the figure.

5. How we handle nutrition

We use a restaurant's most recently published nutrition or allergen document for detailed macros (fat, sodium, protein, etc.) and its live, current menu for calorie figures where the two disagree — some detailed nutrition PDFs are older than a chain's current menu and can lag behind recipe or portion changes. Where that's the case, we label the macro data with the date it was actually published, not the date we checked it, so you can judge how current it is.

6. Computed insights

Figures like “lowest-calorie combo” or a fingers-per-combo comparison are calculated by us directly from a restaurant's own published numbers — they're not separately sourced claims. We avoid subjective rankings like “healthiest” unless we can state a clear, defensible method for the ranking.

7. Review cadence

Each restaurant page shows the date it was last verified. We re-check pages periodically and whenever a reader-submitted correction points to something that may have changed — see our corrections policy.