ShiftTrained Research
Original data on restaurant menus and what staff know about them
Nobody publishes what restaurant menus actually look like, or what staff actually know about them, because almost nobody has the data. We parse menus and run the training, so we do. We publish it free, with the sample labelled and the limitations stated, and we publish the numbers that do not flatter us alongside the ones that do.
The corpus today
16,722 menu items parsed across 139 restaurants, and 45,193 real training answers from 286 staff. It grows every week.
Reports below are dated snapshots. For figures that track the corpus as it grows, see menu statistics and training statistics, which refresh daily.
Reports
No. 1
August 2026
The Price Blind Spot
37.9% of price questions answered wrong
Restaurant staff are roughly twice as likely to get a price question wrong as an ingredient question, and it held in every restaurant we measured. Also: about half of every dish on a menu carries an allergen, and the staff who scored worst on day one finished ahead of the ones who passed first time.
11,318 menu items across 100 restaurants · 38,079 training answers from 206 staff
Report
May 2026
The Menu-Knowledge Lift
11% check-total lift, 34% wine-sales lift
What happens to a restaurant's numbers when the staff actually know the menu. Two POS-verified restaurants, check totals and wine sales measured before and after.
Two POS-verified restaurants · downloadable PDF
How we publish
- Aggregated and anonymized. No individual restaurant's menu, pricing or staff performance is identifiable in anything we publish.
- Sample sizes labelled on every figure, including the thin ones we would not lean on ourselves.
- Limitations stated in full, in the report, not in a footnote at the bottom.
- Free to quote under CC BY 4.0. Attribution is the only thing we ask.
Questions about the methodology, or want a cut of the data we have not published? Email terry@shifttrained.com.
“Since we started using ShiftTrained, wine sales for both bottle and by-the-glass are up 34%. The staff is not scared to talk about the wine anymore.”
George G. · Black Barrel · Chicago
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