Managing an online restauran during a busy service often involves pinging delivery tablets, screaming docket machines, and staff scrambling to manually punch orders into the POS.
While the rise of online delivery has been brilliant for bringing new customers to Australian venues, it has also created quite the headache when it comes to admin, double-handling, and the risk of costly errors.
Add some AI flavour to your menu
Lately, there has been a lot of buzz about artificial intelligence and smart technology in the hospo industry. If you’re running an online restaurant, café or takeaway joint, you might be wondering how to actually use these tools without getting bogged down in confusing tech-speak.
The good news is you do not need robots cooking your hot chips to benefit from smarter operations.
Here is a look at our top 7 tech and smart tools that can help you streamline service, cut down admin time and protect your margins.
1. Smarter marketing and menu creation
Writing engaging menu descriptions takes time that most venue operators simply do not have. This is where basic AI tools can be a massive help.
Generative AI platforms like ChatGPT can take a basic list of ingredients and turn it into mouth-watering copy for your delivery platforms. Instead of just listing “beef burger with cheese”, a smart tool can help you craft a description that actually sells the sizzle.
To save you any guesswork, here’s a prompt format that works well.
Swap in with your own details:
“
Write a 120-character menu description for [DISH NAME] for our [Uber Eats / DoorDash / Menulog] menu.Ingredients: [list ingredients].Tone: warm, lightly playful, Australian English.No emojis. Use sensory language (texture, smell, mouth-feel). Don’t claim “best” or “world-famous”
Use this prompt for your menu descriptions
But appetising copy is only half the battle.
Your online menu also needs to be structured perfectly to convert browsers into buyers. If your layout is confusing or your modifiers are messy, you risk customers clicking away.
Before you launch any new items, run your delivery menu through our free Menu Temp Check. It’s a handy tool that scores your venue’s delivery menu on structure, clarity and conversion potential. It gives you practical tweaks to help turn more views into paid orders.
Learn more about how we score your delivery menu here.
2. Food photography without the photographer
Decent food photos are one of the biggest conversion levers on a delivery app. The problem? Pro food photographers can quote up to $1,500 to $3,000 a day, which most venues can’t justify for a 12-item menu refresh.
Google’s Gemini, particularly its Nano Banana Pro image model, has changed the maths. With a clear prompt and one reference photo of your actual dish on your actual plate, you can generate menu-ready hero shots in about 30 seconds. The free tier mostly gets the job done
A few rules to keep it useful:
- Always start with a real photo of your real dish. Generating from text alone gets you a generic stock burger, not your burger. Upload a phone snap and ask Gemini to enhance, not invent.
- Don’t fake ingredients you don’t actually serve. Australian Consumer Law treats AI-generated marketing the same as any other advertising – misleading visuals are still misleading.
- Gemini auto-watermarks images with SynthID for AI provenance. Add the disclosure where your platform requires it.
Two prompts you can copy and paste:
“
Using the uploaded photo of [DISH NAME], generate a menu-ready hero image. Keep the actual ingredients, plating and proportions. Brighten the natural light, add subtle steam, and place on a warm wooden surface with shallow depth of field. Square 1:1 framing for a delivery app tile, 4K resolution, professional food photography.
PROMPT 1: Hero shot for a delivery app tile
“
Using the uploaded photo of [DISH NAME], keep the dish exactly as plated. Replace the cluttered background with a clean matte ceramic surface in warm cream tone. Even out the lighting to soft side-light, remove any visible utensils or branded napkins. Output as a 1080×1350 portrait image suitable for Instagram and DoorDash feature placement.
PROMPT 2: Refresh a tired existing photo
3. AI-powered food costing with Restoke
Food costs are the single biggest line on most venues’ P&L, and they move every week. If you are still spreadsheet-ing your COGS once a quarter, you are managing margins with a delay built in.
Restoke is a Doshii app partner that uses AI to scan your supplier invoices, extract every line item, and update your recipe costs and COGs automatically. It also handles live inventory, supplier ordering and team SOPs from one back-of-house app.
Through Doshii, Restoke is free to connect and you get the benefit of integrating Restoke with your POS.
4. Ditch the manual re-entry with connected orders
Let us talk about the biggest time sink in any online restaurant. When an order comes through on a delivery app, someone usually has to read the tablet and manually type that order into your POS so it prints in the kitchen. This manual re-entry is slow, frustrating and leaves the door wide open for mistakes.
Is this a familiar sour taste in your mouth? Well it doesn’t need to be.
Smart integration fixes this instantly. Doshii’s Order Injection connects delivery apps like Uber Eats, DoorDash and other delivery platforms directly to your venue’s POS. That means when a customer taps ‘order’ on their phone, the order is sent straight to your POS and onto the kitchen *Chef’s kiss*.
This eliminates double-handling. It reduces the risk of manual errors and frees your staff up to actually focus on making great food and keeping customers happy.
The financial impact of this simple automation is huge. Venues using Doshii report massive savings, with Gnocchi Gnocchi Brother’s saving $30,000 per venue, per year just by ditching the manual rekeying.
“It used to take us ~17 hours a month to rekey in orders. Thanks to Doshii, that’s now a thing of the past”, said Co-Founder, Ben Cleary-Corradini.
5. Smart pricing to protect your margins
Running an online restaurant means dealing with delivery commissions, rising food costs and weekend penalty rates. If your online prices are exactly the same as your dine-in prices, your margins are probably taking a beating (and not the tenderising kind).
Airlines and ride-share apps have used dynamic pricing for years. Now smart tech allows hospo venues to do the same thing. You need the ability to adjust your pricing across delivery apps to cover your costs during peak times or public holidays. This is where Boost comes in.
Boost is a practical tool that helps venues protect margins by easily applying automated price adjustments across your delivery app menus. You can set it up for weekends or public holidays, ensuring your online orders remain profitable even when your operating costs go up.
6. One central place for menu updates
If you run out of avocados during a busy brunch service, updating your online menus can be a nightmare. For example, you have to grab the Uber Eats tablet to mark it out of stock, same for your DoorDash tablet, then again for your other online menu platforms. By the time you have updated everything, three more orders have probably come through for the exact item you do not have.
Technology should simplify your life, not complicate it. Instead of treating your delivery platforms as separate jobs, you need one central place to manage them all.
Doshii’s Menu Manager allows you to choose what goes live, apply changes, and let updates sync automatically across every connected platform.
No longer will one item change or price update cripple you in fear and anxiety. Simply make the change once in the dashboard and it instantly pushes out to all your connected apps.
It’s a slick, seamless way to keep your online offering accurate without the admin headache.
7. Maximise revenue with multiple brands
Here is a hot tip 🔥: If your kitchen has the capacity to cook more food than your current brand is selling, you are sitting on untapped revenue.
Smart tech has made it incredibly easy to launch online-only concepts using the equipment and ingredients you already have.
Let’s say you run a successful burger shop. You already have deep fryers, potatoes, cheese and bacon. You could easily launch a secondary online brand that only sells loaded fries. It targets a completely different customer on the delivery apps, but the food comes out of the exact same kitchen.
Managing multiple online brands manually can be a recipe for disaster. Doshii lets you upsize your kitchen’s potential with Virtual Brands. Allowing you to do so much more with a single POS. Think streamlining orders and menus across brands effortlessly to attract new customers and boost revenue.
Reap the rewards of multiple income streams. Be the Earl of Eggs Benedict in the morning, Baron of the Burgers by day, and the Warrior of the Wok by night with Doshii helping you manage it all from the same POS.
Bring it all together
There are countless apps, AI tools and platforms out there promising to revolutionise your hospitality business. But the truth is a tool is only smart if it actually saves you time and connects smoothly with the systems you already use.
You do not need a complicated technology buffet. You just need one connected system that works hard in the background so you can focus on the food.
Trusted by 4,000+ Australian venues and having served $300+ million orders, Doshii’s connected platform is designed by people who actually know hospo.
Ready to see exactly how much admin time and money smart automation could save your venue? Try our free Savings Calculator today and discover a smarter way to run your online restaurant.