WP Food Manager Review: A Palatable Plugin That Sits at the Head of the Table

With a majority of people choosing to order food for delivery, this area will always be popular. If your restaurant offers takeaway orders, and you run a WordPress website, WP Food Manager could open up not just a door, but a whole aircraft hanger of opportunity.

The WP Food Manager plugin provides a handy and pain-free way to implement a food listing plugin alongside WooCommerce. This means you could set up and be ready to take orders in a matter of minutes. Even better, the cost won’t hurt your wallet.

In this review, we’ll take a full look at WP Food Manager. This will include how it works, how much it costs, and much more. First, let’s talk about when you’d use the plugin.

Why a Restaurant Management Plugin Can Supercharge Your Business

In the US alone, 65 percent of customers order food for delivery. This also means two-thirds of your customer base want to order food from you. Given that the likes of DoorDash and Uber Eats have the market on lock, it seems reasonable to go with these companies if you want to offer deliveries.

However, while there’s merit in increasing your profile and visibility through these third-party services, offering your own ‘in-house’ online delivery has plenty of benefits:

• Brand control is a key positive. For instance, you control the customer experience from start to finish. You can also ensure the experience meets your internal standards and will reflect the quality of your restaurant management.
• Third-party platforms will often charge a fee per order. In turn, this can eat into your own profits. Running your own delivery service can help you save on these fees and potentially offer lower prices to your customers.
• You also have flexibility when it comes to your menu. As such, you’re able to offer seasonal items, brand-specific options, and more all using your own branding and style.
• The ability to communicate with your customers directly, rather than through a third-party service is one of the biggest benefits of running your own delivery service. Not only does it help you build a stronger relationship with your customers, you can also market to them directly.

Following on from the last point, you will also get to keep all of the data you obtain from your online transactions. This will be of huge value, as you can glean insights into ordering habits, menu choices, and much more. In turn, this can make your own menu stronger and profitable.

Introducing WP Food Manager

This brings us to choosing the right plugin for your WordPress website to set up online deliveries. We have just the ticket: WP Food Manager.

This food business management plugin for WordPress has been flying under the radar so far, which is astounding to us. It’s from the same developer as WP Event Manager – a plugin we cover elsewhere on the blog – so there’s a pedigree here you can’t ignore. As you’d expect from this developer, WP Food Manager is feature-rich.

The plugin is three in one, which covers all of the relevant bases you’ll need:

• WP Food Manager. This gives you a no-code way to create menus on your WordPress website. There are ways to change and customize the listing format, the information about each item on the menu, taxonomies, pricing, and more.
• Online Orders. Once you have your menu in place, this plugin will help you sell those items. It integrates with WooCommerce and includes the ability to implement Add to Cart buttons, set up an order details page, customize orders, and much more.
• Restaurant Management. You may run multiple restaurants, in which case, this plugin will be ideal. It lets you use WordPress functionality to add, remove, and manage all of your outlets. It even comes with templates to help display this information to customers on the front end.

In the future, the team plans to introduce food delivery services into WP Food Manager, along with even more plugins aimed at simplifying online food business management.

We’ll look at how the plugin works in greater detail later. For now, though, let’s discuss the cost of WP Food Manager.

Pricing Plans

WP Food Manager provides several premium tiers to help you find the right option for you. Unlike other plugins, you get all of the features and functionality regardless of the tier you choose.

The only difference relates to the number of licenses you receive. There are five annual plans available:

• One site license for $49.
• Three site licenses for $99.
• Five site licenses for $199.
• Ten site licenses for $299.
• Unlimited site license for $399.

Alternatively, you can also purchase plugins individually, such as Online Order and Restaurant Manager, while the core plugin can be found available for free on the WordPress repository.

However, unlike most other plugins, WP Food Manager provides no official refunds within its policy. In our opinion, this is a big misstep as there is inherent value in having the ability to ‘undo’ a purchase if it’s not for you.

Even so, there is a live demo available, along with a free version of the plugin. Both should provide a way to check out the functionality before you buy.

How WP Food Manager Works

Let’s get to grips with WP Food Manager. Fortunately, the installation process is much the same as any other free or premium WordPress plugin. Once you activate it, you can head to the Food Manager dashboard to begin working on your menus:

Here, you can either add a new menu item or look at an existing one. The Edit Food page contains the fields you’ll need to tweak:

You give the menu item a name, write a description, add a thumbnail image in the right-hand side bar, then head into the Food data metabox at the bottom of the page:

Here, you have options to customize the price, stock levels, toppings, ingredients list, nutritional values, and more. In the sidebar, you also have options to set taxonomies and the dietary type (such as Vegan or vegetarian). Once you save your changes, you get a gorgeous display on the front end:

Note that you can also change the default values of these food fields within the WP Food Manager Settings:

There are myriad other settings to choose from here too, in order to tailor the experience to your requirements, and those of your customers:

You can also do the same with individual restaurants, using the Restaurant Manager > All Restaurants screen:

If you head into an Edit Restaurant page, you can add addresses, logos, banner images, opening hours, and more:

When it comes to displaying these on your site, WP Food Manager uses shortcodes. There’s also integration with Elementor if you use that page builder plugin.

What Support and Documentation WP Food Manager Offers

With each purchase of WP Food Manager, you get a year of support and updates. The developer commits to regular updates for all its plugins, as outlined on its support pages.

Speaking of which, we like the Help Center. This combines several different support options (including on-page live chat) to help you find the right method for your query:

• Knowledge base. There is plenty of documentation, which uses neat organization and search to help you find the right article.
• Ticketed support. Premium customers can open a ticket and receive quick help from the team through their support ticket system.

However, this depth and breadth of support is not what it seems. For instance, the video tutorials option brings you to a YouTube channel that doesn’t have any uploads yet. In addition, the developer resources section redirects you to the knowledge base. We were excited to see what was on offer here, as it can show the level and quality of support.

Even so, the support that WP Food Manager does provide is excellent, and we can’t wait to see what more happens in this area.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

It’s almost time to wrap up the WP Food Manager review. However, before we do, let’s run through a few quick questions you may have about using the plugin. If we don’t mention your burning question here, you can always use the comments section at the end of the post to ask us!

Which Plans Let Me Run WP Food Manager on Multiple Sites?

WP Food Manager’s subscription plans offer various options, including 1 site, 3 sites, 5 sites, and unlimited site licenses. You can choose the one that meets your needs.

Are There Any Themes You Can Recommend That Pair Well With the Plugin?

While any theme should work with the plugin thanks to its robust codebase, WP Food Manager also offers a range of themes tailor-made to support the plugin. We like Foodies, but there are many others.

The Demo Site for the Plugin Looks Fantastic. Can I Use the Media Assets for My Own Site?

All of the images and assets you see on the demo site are royalty-free and come with the plugin. As such, you can use them however you wish on your site.

Does WP Food Manager Work With WordPress Multisite?

Yes! If you run a Multisite network of restaurants, you can use WP Food Manager on all of them as a restaurant management solution. Of course, you’ll also need a suitable premium plan to give you the required licenses.

Our Final Thoughts

On the whole, WP Food Manager is excellent, mainly thanks to its super-simple approach to creating menus and delivery options. It’s an intuitive solution ideal for WooCommerce and WordPress.

It’s not perfect – for example, we want to see a better refund policy in place – but the positives outweigh the negatives. Overall, the plugin gets a solid gold star from us!

Are you licking your lips at the thought of using WP Food Manager? Share your thoughts with us in the comments section below!