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Glossary
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Dynamic pricing
Dynamic pricing is adjusting menu or item prices based on demand, time of day, day of week, or channel, rather than holding one fixed price for every situation.
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Email deliverability
Email deliverability is the share of the emails you send that actually reach the inbox, rather than the spam folder or a bounce.
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EMV (chip card)
EMV is the chip-card standard that authenticates a card with an embedded chip instead of a magnetic stripe, shifting fraud liability and shaping POS hardware.
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Expeditor (expo)
The expeditor, or expo, is the person at the pass who calls and paces tickets, coordinates the stations, and checks every plate for accuracy before it leaves the kitchen.
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Fast casual
Fast casual is a restaurant format between quick-service and full-service: guests order at a counter as in fast food, but the food quality, ingredients, and prices are closer to a sit-down restaurant.
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Featured snippet
A featured snippet is the answer box at the very top of some Google results, where Google quotes a short answer pulled directly from a web page.
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First-party data
First-party data is the customer information you collect directly and own outright (names, emails, phone numbers, order history, visit frequency) as opposed to data a marketplace or platform holds on your behalf.
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First-party ordering
First-party ordering is when guests order directly through channels you own (your website, app, or QR menu) so you keep the customer relationship, the data, and most of the margin.
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Food cost percentage
Food cost percentage is the cost of the ingredients you used, divided by the sales those ingredients generated, over a set period.
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Food waste
Food waste is edible food a restaurant buys but never sells, lost to spoilage, over-prep, trim, and plate waste, and it is a direct hit to food-cost margin.
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Front of house
Front of house (FOH) is everything the guest sees and interacts with: the dining room, bar, host stand, and the servers, bartenders, and hosts who run it.
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Full-service restaurant (FSR)
A full-service restaurant (FSR) is a sit-down format with table service, where guests are seated, served by staff, and pay after the meal, and it carries the widest and most complex set of operations of any format.
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Generative engine optimization (GEO)
Generative engine optimization (GEO) is the practice of making your restaurant show up and get recommended inside AI-generated answers from tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Google's AI Overviews.
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Ghost kitchen
A ghost kitchen (also called a dark or cloud kitchen) is a delivery-only cooking operation with no dining room and no walk-up counter, built to fulfill online orders.
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Gift card
A gift card is prepaid stored value sold to guests, counted as a liability until it is redeemed and doubling as a low-cost acquisition and loyalty tool.
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Google Business Profile
Google Business Profile is the free Google listing that controls how your restaurant appears in Google Search and Maps: your hours, photos, menu, reviews, and the button to call, direct, or order.
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Gross profit margin
Gross profit margin is sales minus Cost of goods sold (COGS), expressed as a percentage of sales: the share of each dollar left after paying for the food and drink itself.
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Guest check
A guest check is the itemized bill for a single table or order, the unit of sale your POS opens, rings items into, and closes when it is paid.
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Hallucination
A hallucination is when an AI model states something false as if it were true, producing confident, fluent, and completely wrong information.
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Handheld POS
A handheld POS is a mobile terminal a server carries to take orders and payments tableside, firing tickets straight to the kitchen and turning tables faster.
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Interchange fee
The interchange fee is the portion of every card transaction that the networks pass to the cardholder's bank, and it is the largest, non-negotiable part of processing cost.
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Kitchen display system (KDS)
A kitchen display system (KDS) is a set of kitchen screens that replaces paper tickets, routing each order to the right station and timing it through the cook.
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Labor cost percentage
Labor cost percentage is total labor cost (wages, salaries, taxes, and benefits) divided by sales over a given period.
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Large language model (LLM)
A large language model (LLM) is the type of AI, trained on vast amounts of text, that powers tools like ChatGPT by predicting and generating human-like language.