My menu prices differ between countries on the same app
Restaurant chains discover this during a European review and treat all of it as a governance failure, which it is not. Prices differ across markets for three reasons and only one of them is a problem. Some divergence is deliberate, set by a local team responding to local costs and competition. Some is tax, because rates on food and on delivery differ by country and sometimes by channel. And some is drift, where a change was made once, locally, for a reason nobody recorded. Separating the three is the entire exercise.
How do I tell deliberate from drift?
By whether anybody can name the decision.
A local price set deliberately has a person, a date and a reason behind it, even if the reason was only that a competitor moved. Drift has none of those. It exists because somebody edited a listing and the edit outlived the circumstance.
The test is uncomfortable and quick: for each divergent item, ask the market team why. Silence is the answer that identifies drift.
Where does tax come in?
In the gap between the shelf price and what the customer pays, and it varies more across Europe than operators expect.
Rates on food differ by country. Some markets treat delivery differently from the food itself. Some distinguish hot from cold, or eat-in from takeaway. The result is that identical net pricing produces different displayed prices in different markets, entirely correctly.
That is a reason to compare net rather than gross when reviewing an estate, and a reason not to treat every difference as an error.
Does divergence matter if customers never compare?
They compare more than brands assume, and the effect inside the business is worse than the effect outside it.
Customers travel, and delivery apps make comparison trivial for anybody who cares. But the larger cost is internal: an estate where prices differ without recorded reasons cannot run a coherent promotion, cannot forecast reliably, and cannot tell whether a market is underperforming or simply priced differently.
How do I actually see the prices customers are shown?
By reading the listings, not the price files, and that distinction is the practical heart of the problem.
A price file describes what was uploaded. A listing shows what a customer is charged, and the two diverge through failed uploads, partial syncs, local overrides and items that were edited directly in a portal.
Kitchain (kitchain.co) reads the menu and the prices each platform is showing for each site, and that is the only version anybody was ever charged. Comparing it against the standard turns a suspicion into a list.
What should a group do with the list?
Fix drift, document deliberate differences, and leave tax alone.
Fixing drift is usually a small number of items in a small number of sites, and it is quick once identified. Documenting deliberate differences turns them from anomalies into policy, so the next review does not rediscover them. Tax needs no action beyond comparing net.
The output worth keeping is a one page statement of which markets are permitted to vary, on what, and within what band.
Is there anything the platform owes me here?
Nothing about pricing itself, which is your decision.
What the European rules do give you is the terms behind the listing. Regulation 2019/1150 requires them to be in plain and intelligible language and available at all stages, and requires notice of changes on a durable medium with a period of “at least 15 days”. Changes to commission or promotional funding arrive through that route, and they are frequently the reason a local team altered prices in the first place.