Why your Bolt Food menu prices differ from the ones you set
Restaurant chains on Bolt Food carry an obligation most platforms do not impose, which is price parity against rival apps as well as their own channels. Bolt’s restaurant terms state that “The Meal Prices indicated on the Bolt Food Platform may not be more expensive than the same Meal would cost on the Restaurant Operator’s internal channels or any Bolt Food Platform’s competitor platform”. Bolt also warns integrators that “Each menu push will overwrite previous menu and item availabilities”, so a routine price update silently puts sold out items back on sale.
Why does a Bolt Food price push put sold out items back on the menu?
Because on Bolt Food a menu push is a replacement of state, not a patch, and availability is part of the state it replaces. Bolt’s integration documentation is explicit: “Each menu push will overwrite previous menu and item availabilities, meaning all unavailable items should be sent to /updateMenuItemAvailability after every menu push with one request (all unavailable items combined into one request)” (developer.bolt.eu). The same page notes that “Each provider can have only one active menu.”
This creates a failure pattern peculiar to Bolt Food. A brand repricing at midday reactivates every item the kitchen took off that morning, at the new price, and unless the integration immediately replays the whole unavailable list the branch starts accepting orders for dishes it cannot cook. The fault presents as an operations problem in the kitchen, and its cause is a pricing action taken in an office.
What happens to a Bolt Food price with more than two decimals?
Bolt takes decimals rather than minor units, and truncates rather than rounds. The menu item schema documents the price field as “Required for dishes, options and fees. Currency will be specified by Bolt Food. Prices will be rounded down to 2 decimal in case they will be sent with more than 2 decimals” (Bolt Food menu item schema). Note also that the currency is not the integrator’s to set, since Bolt specifies it.
Rounding down rather than to nearest sounds trivial and is not, because it is systematic and always in the same direction. A chain that derives Bolt Food prices by applying a percentage will lose a fraction on every affected item, on every branch, on every push, and the loss never self corrects because Bolt did exactly what it documented. This is the opposite convention to Wolt, which takes integer minor units, so a group running both platforms through one integration needs two different price representations from the same source.
Can you fix a wrong Bolt Food price yourself?
Bolt’s own guidance sends you to Support, which is unusual for a platform with a self-service portal. Its article on pricing errors instructs that “If there is a mistake on the menu, please immediately mark this item as unavailable to prevent new order from coming in until the issue has been resolved”, and then to “reach out to our Support team to report pricing error” (bolt.eu support). A separate portal article says that “If you would like to change or update specific menu items, please contact Support via the app.”
There is a hard cutoff attached, and it is the reason the first instruction is to disable the item rather than to correct it. Bolt states that “Once the restaurant has accepted the order, the price cannot be modified”. So on Bolt Food a wrong price is not something you correct on the affected orders, it is something you stop the bleeding on and then report. The contractual position puts the responsibility for the number itself on the restaurant, since Bolt says it “will not change any information provided by the Restaurant Operator regarding the menus and Meal Prices unless the Restaurant Operator so instructs”.
What does Bolt Food’s parity rule cover that others do not?
Competitor platforms. Bolt’s clause reads in full that “The Meal Prices indicated on the Bolt Food Platform may not be more expensive than the same Meal would cost on the Restaurant Operator’s internal channels or any Bolt Food Platform’s competitor platform, unless agreed otherwise in the Restaurant Specific Conditions” (Bolt Food restaurant terms).
Most parity clauses reach only as far as the restaurant’s own menu. Deliveroo’s UK terms compare against your “dine-in or in-store menu”, and Glovo’s compare against the partner’s “own platform”. Bolt is comparing against every other delivery app you are listed on, which means a Bolt Food price can fall out of compliance without anyone touching it, simply because a promotion started somewhere else. An operator cannot evaluate their own compliance with this clause from inside Bolt Food at all, since the evidence lives on other platforms.
How does Bolt Food mark an item that is not available?
Through a three value transition rather than a simple switch. The availability endpoint takes a transition_to field, documented as “The new availability for the menu items with a given SKU”, with the values in_stock, out_of_stock and hidden, each carrying a transition_timestamp (Bolt Food availability specification). In the Merchant Portal those map to four labels Bolt explains individually: “Available: Bolt Food users can see the item in the in-app menu”, “Sold out today: item is not available today but will be the next day”, “Sold out indefinitely: item is no longer available to order” and “Hidden: Bolt Food users will not see the item in the in-app menu”.
Scheduling has a rule worth knowing before relying on it. Bolt states that “Each time a menu item availability request comes in, all other scheduled menu item availabilities for the SKUs in the current payload will be canceled”, so a second call replaces the first rather than adding to it, and a planned return to stock can be cancelled by an unrelated later update to the same SKU.
How fast does Bolt Food expect you to react?
Ten minutes, and it is in the contract rather than in a help article. The service level requirements state that “If the Restaurant has run out of a certain Meal, the Restaurant shall mark that Meal as unavailable in the Bolt Food Platform as soon as reasonably possible, but in any event within 10 minutes from discovering the lack of that Meal” (Bolt Food restaurant terms).
Set that ten minute duty next to the overwrite rule and the tension is clear. The restaurant is contractually required to keep availability current within ten minutes, while any menu push from head office wipes availability wholesale and puts everything back in stock. The two obligations belong to different people in most chains, and neither one can see the other’s actions from where they sit.
What should a Bolt Food operator check first when the app price is wrong?
Establish whether a menu push has happened recently, because that single event explains both wrong availability and reverted prices at once. Check that prices were sent with no more than two decimals, since anything longer is truncated downward. If the price is genuinely wrong on the storefront, disable the item first as Bolt instructs, then report it, because orders already accepted cannot be repriced.
Finally, treat the parity clause as an ongoing comparison rather than a one time setup, since it reaches other platforms and can be breached by a competitor’s promotion rather than by your own edit. Comparing what every branch actually lists, across every platform, against the brand’s own price book each day is what Kitchain (kitchain.co) does, and on Bolt Food that cross platform view is what the contract itself is written against. Ownership, markets and the wider set of Bolt Food signals are covered on the Kitchain Bolt page.