TheEvery restaurant page on TheManued exists because we found real, published pricing for that chain in that specific country — not because we estimated, guessed, or filled in a gap to make a page look complete. This page explains how that actually works.
We start with a chain's own official site whenever it publishes prices directly — this gives the cleanest, most reliable data and needs no staleness caveat. When a chain doesn't publish prices itself, which is common, we work through delivery-platform listings and dedicated menu-price tracking sites for that country. Every restaurant page carries a source note explaining exactly where its numbers came from and when they were checked, so you can judge the confidence of any given price yourself rather than take it on faith.
We do not invent a price to fill a gap. If we can't find a reliable number for an item, we leave it off the page rather than estimate one. If the only source we can find is old, we publish it with its true original date — never today's date — so it's clear the number may be stale. You'll sometimes see a restaurant page with only a handful of items rather than a full menu; that's this policy working as intended, not corner-cutting.
Menu prices vary by country, by city, and often by individual store — a McDonald's in central London and a McDonald's in a small English town rarely charge the same price for a Big Mac. Where we know this, we say so directly in the source notes, and we favour figures that read as broadly representative over a single unusually cheap or expensive outlier.
We also check for a specific failure mode: aggregator sites sometimes attach the wrong data to a brand entirely, either through a data-entry error or a name collision with an unrelated business. Before publishing any chain we haven't sourced directly from its own site, we sanity-check the item names and pricing against what we independently know about that brand's real menu. Several times while building this database we caught exactly this kind of mismatch and excluded the data rather than publish it.
Finally, every published restaurant page shows a "last verified" date. We treat pages older than about 90 days as due for a refresh, and re-checking existing pages against live sources is an ongoing part of maintaining this site, not a one-time step.