Restaurant upselling techniques that do not annoy guests

Make one offer that fits the order, say its price, and take the first no. Put the same offer on the menu and in the POS, so guests still see it when staff are too busy to ask. Then count the attach rate: orders that include the item divided by the orders where you could have offered it.

This guide covers the dining room, the counter and the phone: what to offer, what to say, how to set up prompts in Toast, Square and Clover, and how to test an offer. The lane has its own page. Our drive-thru upselling guide covers offers at the speaker and what they do to order time.

What does research say about suggesting add-ons?

Few studies test upselling in a working restaurant and state their method. Here are two.

Study	How it measured	What it found	Limits
Van Kleef, van den Broek and van Trijp, Wageningen University (2015)	A field experiment at breakfast in a self-service restaurant. After a baseline period, cashiers used four different prompts suggesting a side dish over 13 weeks. Register sales, observation and a survey of 393 guests	Orange juice went from 20% of breakfasts sold at baseline to 35% to 42% in the weeks cashiers suggested it. Fruit salad rose from 3% to 9%, and pancakes from 1% to 3%. Surveyed guests did not feel pressured to buy a side	One restaurant and one meal. The abstract gives shares of breakfasts, with no sales in money
Tom Tan (Southern Methodist University) and Serguei Netessine (INSEAD), 2014	Detailed operating data from a restaurant chain, looking at how the number of tables or diners a server handles at once affects sales and meal length	With a light load, servers put more effort into selling as tables are added, and service slows. Above a certain load, they cut back on selling and work faster	One chain. It infers selling effort from sales, and does not count offers guests heard

Sources: the verbal prompting study in Applied Psychology: Health and Well-Being, and the server workload study in SMU's research archive. We read the abstract of each.

The breakfast study supports a plain cashier line that names one item, and the workload study explains why the offer disappears on a full floor. A prompt on the menu or the POS screen keeps the offer in front of guests when servers stop asking. For kiosks, our page on what studies found about kiosks and check size gives each source's method and limits.

Which offer fits each part of the restaurant?

The lines below are our examples. Put in your own item and price.

Where	When to offer	Example line	Skip it when
Table: drinks	At the greeting, before the table orders food	"Can I start you with our house lemonade while you look? It's [price]."	The table orders water and says they are in a hurry
Table: starter	After drinks arrive, before mains are ordered	"The [starter] is made to share. It's [price]. One for the table?"	The table has already ordered mains
Table: dessert or coffee	When you clear the mains	"Would anyone like dessert? The [dessert] is [price] tonight."	A guest has asked for the check
Counter	After the guest says that is everything, before the total	"Want to add [side] to that for [price]?"	The guest has said no once already
Phone	After the order, before the read-back, so the add-on is read back too	"Would you like to add [item] for [price]?"	The caller has asked about an allergy and is waiting on the kitchen
Online and kiosk	In the cart, before payment	A picture, the price and a "No thanks" button	The item is sold out

Our restaurant phone scripts give the full takeout call. The offer goes after the guest says that is everything and before the read-back.

How can the menu do the selling?

A menu reaches every guest, on every shift. These are our suggestions:

• Print the add-on under the item it goes with, with its price: "Add bacon" under the burger, "Add chicken" under the salad.
• Build common pairings as combos and give each one its own button, so staff ring it in one tap.
• Show every size with its price as a variation of the item.
• Name one item in the spoken line. The prompts in the breakfast study each suggested one named side.
• Push items that leave the most after food cost and that the kitchen can make at the peak. Our menu engineering guide sorts items by popularity and contribution.

For screens, our kiosk menu guide covers photos, modifier groups and where upsells go.

How do you set up upsell prompts in Toast, Square and Clover?

POS	Prompt staff see	Prompt guests see	What it reports
Toast	Menu Upsells show a blue banner on Toast Flex and Toast Go when a server picks the item that triggers it. Four types: menu pairing, standalone, modifier and item upgrade	The same upsells on Toast Kiosk, with a "No thanks" button, and on the guest-facing display. Online ordering suggests items in the cart	Upsell sales, items upsold, the check-size gap with and without an upsell, the share of guests who accepted, and results by server
Square	Modifier sets with a price on each add-on. You set the order sets appear in, and Square for Restaurants steps staff through required sets	Smart Upsells on Square Kiosk show up to three suggested items on the cart screen, with "No thanks"	Modifiers appear on tickets, receipts and in the sales report
Clover	A modifier group with "Show upon order entry on POS" turned on appears for servers when they add the item. Set the minimum and maximum for the group	Clover's kiosk page says it promotes cross-selling and upselling. Ask Clover how to set it up	Ask Clover which report shows modifier sales

Sources: Toast's Menu Upsells guide and online ordering upsell guide, Square's Smart Upsells article and modifier guide, Clover's modifier group help and kiosk page.

A few limits from those pages. On Toast Kiosk, modifier recommendations and item upgrades are not available. Toast online ordering picks the suggested items by algorithm unless you have Online Ordering Pro in the US. Square Kiosk leaves out combos, and items whose required modifiers have no default. Square writes its Smart Upsells article for Square Plus and Premium subscribers.

Set an add-on group to a minimum of zero so staff can skip it, and leave paid add-ons unselected. A guest should tap to add an item, and one tap should decline it.

What keeps an upsell from annoying guests?

1. One offer per course, or per order at the counter.
2. Say the price. A yes then means the guest agreed to the cost.
3. Take the first no. Move on to the read-back or the next course.
4. Fill a gap in the order. Offer a drink to a table with none, a side with a sandwich on its own.
5. Keep the offer out of an allergy question. Answer the question, or bring the manager, first.
6. Drop sold-out items from prompts at once, on the POS, the kiosk and the card by the phone.
7. Tell staff the offer of the day at lineup, with its price, so everyone says the same thing.

How do you measure attach rate?

Attach rate is the orders that include the item divided by the eligible orders. Define eligible before you start, for example every dinner check with a main course. Pull both counts from your POS item sales report, filtered to the same daypart.

Some guests would have bought the item anyway, so compare offer days with other days. Run the offer on alternate days for two weeks, at the same dayparts, with the same prices and no other promotion. Here is a made-up dessert test:

Measure	Offer days	Other days
Eligible dinner checks	840	800
Checks with a dessert	126	88
Attach rate	Offer days attach rate: 15.0%	Other days attach rate: 11.0%

The gap is 4.0 points, or 40 more desserts per 1,000 dinner checks. In this example a dessert sells for $9.00 and costs $2.50 in food, so each one leaves $6.50. That is 40 times $6.50, or $260 more per 1,000 checks after food cost.

Then check what the offer cost you. If tables turned more slowly at the peak on offer days, count the covers you lost. Keep the offer only where the balance is positive. Toast's upsell report shows the share of guests who accepted. On other systems, a manager can tally offers and yeses on 50 checks.

Does the same method work for phone orders?

Yes. Make the offer after the caller finishes and before the read-back, and build the add-on as a modifier so it prints on the ticket. Our guide to phone order mistakes covers modifier setup and the read-back.

If software takes the calls, test it the same way. Maple Pro lists intelligent upselling among its plan features, at $350 a month billed monthly or $220 a month billed yearly, and takes phone orders into supported POS systems. The product page states no sales lift, so log AI-taken phone orders as their own group and compare attach rates.

Published by Maple, which sells AI phone answering and ordering to restaurants. This AI-assisted guide combines two published studies, read in abstract, with Toast, Square and Clover help pages and an original offer table and test plan. The example lines and the dessert test are made up. It does not report a Maple test or promise a sales lift.