We're Building AI-Powered Menu Training for Restaurants
We're building something we wish existed ten years ago.
ShiftTrained is an AI-powered menu training platform designed specifically for restaurants. The concept is simple: upload your menu, and our AI reads every item — ingredients, descriptions, allergens, prices, pairings — and generates hundreds of quiz questions automatically. Your staff takes the quiz on their phone. You see exactly who knows the menu and who doesn't.
Why We're Building This
This project comes from necessity, not theory. The founder behind ShiftTrained has opened, operated, and sold over 20 restaurant concepts in Chicago. Fine dining, sports bars, casual spots — every type of restaurant you can think of.
And across every single concept, one problem never went away: staff who couldn't describe the menu to guests.
Pre-shift meetings didn't fix it. Laminated study guides didn't fix it. Hoping they'd read the menu on their own definitely didn't fix it. The problem persisted because there was never a system — just good intentions and crossed fingers.
So we built the system.
How It Works
The process takes about ten minutes from start to finish.
You upload your menu as a PDF. Our AI — powered by advanced language models — parses every item on the menu. It understands categories, ingredients, preparation methods, allergens, dietary information, and pricing.
Then it generates quiz questions across ten categories: Ingredients, Preparation, Allergens and Dietary, Pairings, Pricing, Menu Sections, Descriptions, Specials, Beverages, and General Knowledge. We're talking hundreds of questions from a single menu, both multiple choice and true/false.
Your staff gets a link. They tap it on their phone, enter their name, and take the quiz. No app download, no login, no friction. Just a branded quiz that takes a few minutes to complete.
You see the results instantly. Scores, time taken, which questions they missed, which categories they're weakest in. Real data instead of gut feelings.
What's Coming
We're in active development right now, building toward a launch that includes AI-generated study guides for employees who need extra help, gamification features like leaderboards and badges to keep staff engaged, and analytics that show managers exactly where their team's knowledge gaps are.
We'll be sharing more updates here as we get closer to launch. If you run a restaurant and the phrase "do you know what's in the risotto?" makes your eye twitch, stay tuned. We're building this for you.
Have a great day! — Terry
