How a 7-location brewery used MustHaveMenus + Toast to turn menu updates into a one-person, one-minute job.
About Starr Hill Brewing
Starr Hill Brewing is a Virginia-based craft brewery with 7 taproom locations and 21 digital displays. Brian, the Director of Operations, oversees a team that manages rotating beer menus, seasonal food offerings, event signage, and branded display content across every location — all while keeping multiple channels accurate, synchronized, and on-brand.
The Challenge
Before MustHaveMenus, Starr Hill's menu management was a patchwork
of tools: Canva, the Adobe Suite, Untappd, spreadsheets, and thumb
drives. Every menu change meant manually re-entering or
reformatting the same information across multiple systems. Digital
beer menus were maintained separately from print, and neither was
reliably in sync with what lived in Toast.
In a fast-paced taproom environment where the team wears many hats,
this created constant exposure to outdated pricing, typos, and conflicting
information across channels. When a keg kicked or a menu changed, the
ripple effect was significant — and the risk of guests seeing something
inaccurate was real.
The deeper problem was structural: there was no single
source of truth. Toast held the most accurate item and pricing data,
but there was no way to push that data cleanly into print or digital
menus. Every update required parallel work in parallel tools, and the
more channels you needed to update, the more opportunities there were
for things to fall through the cracks.
The Solution: Toast as the source of truth
Starr Hill's implementation of MustHaveMenus centers on a direct
integration with their Toast POS. Rather than re-entering menu data
into a separate design tool, item names, descriptions, and pricing
flow from Toast directly into MustHaveMenus templates — eliminating
redundant data entry and the errors that come with it.
This means that when something changes in Toast, the update is available
in MustHaveMenus immediately. Staff can refresh their templates, push
updated content to digital screens, and download print-ready files —
all from the same platform, all drawing from the same source. For a brewery
with 7 locations and menus that rotate frequently, this is a meaningful
reduction in both labor and risk.
Implementation: Solving the Print Timing Problem
One of the most valuable workflows Starr Hill developed was a
solution to a problem every multi-channel restaurant operator knows
well: how do you coordinate a menu change across print, digital, and
POS without everything going live at different times?
Print menus are inherently a planning tool. To produce one, you have
to commit to exactly what's on the menu — every item, every price, every
description. That process naturally forces alignment between marketing
and operations, and the resulting document becomes a shared reference
point that both teams can review and approve before anything goes public.
Starr Hill leaned into this dynamic by using deep copies inside Toast
to build out future menu versions in advance, without disrupting the
live POS. They would pull that staged data into MustHaveMenus, finalize
the print design, and get internal sign-off — all before the change went
live anywhere. When the time came to launch, the print file was already
done, the digital templates were already updated, and the POS change
was ready to publish. Everything went live together.
This approach transformed what had been a stressful, error-prone scramble
into a repeatable, coordinated process. It's a model that any Toast-integrated
restaurant can replicate.
Workflow Today
Menu management at Starr Hill is now fluid and decentralized.
Location-level operators, managers, and even bartenders can make
updates directly when needed. When a keg kicks, the workflow is
straightforward: update Toast, refresh the design in MustHaveMenus,
push to digital screens, download the print file, and move on —
often in under a minute for beer menu changes.
Brian emphasized that the platform is easy to learn and easy to teach,
which matters in hospitality where team skill sets vary widely. The team
also relies on MustHaveMenus to keep layouts visually clean and consistent
even as item counts and spacing shift across menus.
Results & Operational Improvements
Since implementing MustHaveMenus with Toast, Starr Hill has achieved
stronger consistency across every menu channel — not by adding
process, but by removing the redundant work that made consistency so
hard to maintain.
The team no longer re-enters data. They no longer rely on outside designers
for routine menu changes. They no longer worry about what happens when
key people are out. Brian identified the biggest wins as peace of mind,
stronger process consistency, easier training, more creative flexibility,
and confidence that what guests see is always accurate.
ROI Summary
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No more menu retyping
-
Toast is the single source of truth
-
Beer menu updates in under a minute
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No outside designers needed
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Full food menu overhauls in approximately 4 hours
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Easy to train
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All channels go live together
