Order throttling

Order throttling is a cap on how many orders, or how much order value, a system will accept in a given time window, usually fifteen or twenty minutes. Beyond the cap the next customer is offered a later slot instead of being added to a queue the kitchen has no chance of clearing. It is the difference between a busy Friday and a bad Friday, and it costs one customer ten minutes rather than fifty customers cold food.

In practice

Throttling limits the number of orders, or the total value of orders, that a system will accept for any given fifteen or twenty-minute window. Beyond the cap, the next customer is offered a later slot rather than being quietly added to a queue that is already too long.

It is the difference between a busy Friday and a bad Friday. Without it, the website keeps taking orders at the advertised wait time while the kitchen falls further behind, and every one of those customers gets cold food and a reason not to come back. With it, somebody waits ten minutes longer at the point of ordering, which is the one moment they do not mind.

Throttling only works if the quoted time shown on the website is the same number the kitchen is working to. If the two live in separate systems, the promise and the reality drift apart by about an hour into service.

Also called: order capping, slot limits.

Questions people ask about order throttling

How many orders should a slot allow?

Start from how long your slowest popular item takes and how many of them can be in the fryer or the oven at once, not from a figure in a settings screen. Most kitchens already know the answer in the form of "we can do about eight orders in a quarter of an hour", which is exactly the number the cap wants.

Does throttling lose you orders?

It moves them rather than losing them: the customer is offered a later time, and most accept. What does lose orders is accepting everything at the advertised wait and then running an hour behind, because the people who get cold food do not come back and the ones who waited tell other people.

Why does throttling stop working?

Almost always because the quoted time on the website is not the number the kitchen is working to. If the website and the kitchen queue live in separate systems, the promise and the reality drift apart within about an hour of service starting, and the cap is protecting a time nobody is keeping to.

Where to go next

Kitchen displays, where the quoted time comes from →