Daily order for tracking excess food

The orders API returns a daily excess food order for restaurants that use the Toast platform's waste tracking feature. An excess food order, also referred to as a waste order, is a special type of order created in the Toast platform to track excess food in a restaurant. Like guest orders, excess food orders may contain menu items, modifiers, or both.

Currently, the Toast platform creates one excess food order per day at each restaurant using the waste tracking feature. The Toast platform creates the daily excess food order the first time a restaurant employee uses the waste tracking feature to identify excess food. If restaurant employees identify additional excess food over the course of the business day, that excess food is added to the daily excess food order. If no excess food is identified on a given day, no excess food order is created for that day.

The orders API indicates that an order is an excess food order using the excessFood value on the Order object. Excess food orders are structurally the same as standard guest orders. However, certain behavior is applied to these orders automatically by the waste tracking feature:

• The excessFood field is set to true.

• Exactly one check is created on each excess food order.

• Each selection on the check is discounted to $0 using an item-level 100% discount. This discount is created automatically by the Toast platform and has the name Waste.

• If the restaurant has configured waste reasons and the employee identifying the waste selects one of those reasons when tracking the item in the POS, that reason is applied to the discounted selection. Note that waste reasons are not returned in orders API responses.

Because all selections on the check are discounted, the price value on each selection and the amount value of the check is always $0. The preDiscountPrice value on each selection, however, reflects the retail value of each selection. If you use the preDiscountPrice field in order to report on gross sales, you might want to exclude excess food orders from this calculation.