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Why This Matters

When a guest asks “Is this dish safe for my peanut allergy?”, the answer isn’t as simple as checking a label. A Caesar salad might seem safe—until you realize the house-made dressing contains anchovy paste, or the croutons were fried in peanut oil, or the kitchen uses a shared prep surface. EveryBite maintains a deep, structured food hierarchy that traces every dish back to its fundamental components. This is how we deliver authoritative answers—not guesses, not keyword matching, but genuine ingredient-level understanding.

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The Seven Layers

Menu
└── Dish
    └── Recipe
        └── Prep Recipe
            └── Ingredient
                └── Ingredient Data
                    └── Ingredient Specification
What the guest orders. “Seasonal Harvest Salad”, “Classic Cheeseburger”, “Thai Peanut Bowl”.A dish has a name, description, price, and category—but that’s just the surface. The real complexity lives underneath.
How the dish is assembled. A recipe specifies which components come together and in what quantities.The Seasonal Harvest Salad recipe might call for: mixed greens base, candied pecans, goat cheese crumbles, dried cranberries, citrus vinaigrette. Each of these is either a raw ingredient or a prep recipe.
Components made in-house before service. The citrus vinaigrette isn’t a single ingredient—it’s olive oil, orange juice, lemon juice, honey, Dijon mustard, salt, and pepper, whisked together.Prep recipes are where hidden allergens often lurk. That “house-made crouton” might contain butter. That “signature sauce” might include soy.
The actual items that go into prep recipes and dishes. This is where we track allergens, dietary classifications, and nutritional content.We also track substitutes—if a recipe calls for butter but the kitchen can substitute olive oil on request, that’s a potential accommodation for dairy-free guests.
Nutritional facts, allergen classifications, and dietary attributes for each ingredient. Calories, protein, carbs, fat, sodium, fiber, sugar—plus the full allergen profile.This data comes from authoritative sources: USDA FoodData Central, manufacturer specifications, and direct verification with restaurant partners.
The most granular level. Not just “olive oil” but “Pompeian Extra Virgin Olive Oil, 16oz”—the specific product the restaurant actually uses.Specifications matter because nutritional content varies between brands and preparations. Generic “cheddar cheese” data is an approximation; the actual product spec is the truth.

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What We Track

At each layer, we capture the data that makes precision possible:
  • Ingredient Sourcing — Exact products, brands, and specs
  • Recipe Builds — Weights, measures, yields
  • Cooking Method Adjustments — Raw vs cooked, oil absorption, loss factors
  • Portion Sizing — Single, 1 slice, 12 oz soda cup

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Why We Go This Deep

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Allergen Accuracy

A dish might look egg-free, but:
  • The Caesar dressing contains egg yolk
  • The prep recipe for the breading includes egg wash
  • The pasta is made with whole eggs
We trace allergens through every layer so guests get accurate warnings—not false confidence.

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Nutrition Precision

“About 500 calories” isn’t good enough for someone managing diabetes or training for a competition. By rolling up nutrition from ingredient specifications through prep recipes to the final dish, we provide precise values—not estimates.

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Customization Intelligence

When a guest asks “Can I get this without dairy?”, we can trace through the hierarchy to identify:
  • Which ingredients contain dairy
  • Which have dairy-free substitutes available
  • What the nutritional impact of the substitution would be

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Direct from the Source

This isn’t scraped data. It isn’t crowdsourced. It isn’t inferred from menu descriptions. Every ingredient, prep recipe, and recipe in our system comes directly from our restaurant partners—verified by their teams and maintained as their operations evolve. This is their data, kept accurate by the people who actually run the kitchens. Restaurant kitchens are dynamic environments. Vendors change, introducing new allergens or removing old ones. Seasonal ingredients rotate in and out. Limited-time offerings launch and expire. A new prep recipe replaces an old one. A supplier substitution quietly changes an ingredient specification. These changes happen constantly at every level of the hierarchy—and they all have implications for allergen safety and nutritional accuracy. EveryBite maintains continuous data feeds with our restaurant partners, capturing updates as they happen. When a chain switches suppliers for their signature sauce, we know. When a new LTO hits the menu, it’s in our system. When a recipe modification removes dairy from a dish that previously contained it, that change is reflected immediately. The data you access through the SmartMenu API isn’t a static snapshot—it’s a living reflection of what’s actually being served today. You focus on building great dining experiences. We handle the complexity of keeping ingredient intelligence accurate, current, and complete.

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What This Means for You

You don’t need to understand or work with this hierarchy directly. The SmartMenu API abstracts all of this complexity into simple, queryable endpoints. When you call search with allergen exclusions, we’re traversing this entire hierarchy—checking every ingredient, prep recipe, and specification—to give you accurate match results. When you display a dish’s allergen badges, those badges represent deep analysis, not surface-level keyword matching. This is why you integrate with EveryBite rather than building it yourself. The data model, the sourcing, the verification, the ongoing maintenance—it’s a significant undertaking that we’ve already done.