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.
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this created constant exposure to outdated pricing, typos, and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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
No more menu retypingToast is the single source of truthBeer menu updates in under a minuteNo outside designers neededFull food menu overhauls in approximately 4 hoursEasy to trainAll channels go live together