WhatsApp catalog limits every restaurant runs into
A WhatsApp catalog holds up to 500 products, you get one catalog per WhatsApp Business Account, item names are capped at 24 characters, and each product can carry up to 10 images or videos in JPG or PNG. Most restaurants never approach 500 items; they run into the 24-character name limit on day one.
Why 24 characters is the limit that actually bites
"Grilled Chicken Sandwich with Fries" is 35 characters. It will not fit. You have to decide what the name carries and what moves into the description, and the decision has to be consistent across the whole menu or browsing becomes confusing.
A rule that works: the name is the dish, and nothing else. Size, sides, and preparation go in the description or become options. "Chicken Sandwich" is 16 characters and leaves room for a size variant.
Why fewer items outperform more
The technical ceiling is 500, but the practical ceiling is much lower: around 100 items is the common guidance for keeping a catalog usable. This is not a platform restriction; it's a browsing one. A customer scrolling a phone screen will not compare 300 items, they will give up.
If your full menu is larger than that, the catalog should hold what actually sells, not everything you're capable of making.
One catalog per account, and what that means for branches
The one-catalog-per-account limit is the constraint multi-branch restaurants hit hardest. If branches have genuinely different menus or prices, a single shared catalog cannot express that. You either normalise the menu across branches, or you need a layer above the catalog that serves the right items per branch.
A structure that holds up
- Name: the dish only, under 24 characters, consistent across the menu.
- Description: what the name couldn't carry, such as ingredients, size, spice level, and allergens.
- Categories that match how people order (breakfast, sandwiches, sides, drinks), not how the kitchen is organised.
- One clear photo per item. Extra images matter less than the first one being good.
- Remove unavailable items rather than leaving them listed. A customer who orders something you can't make is a worse outcome than a shorter menu.
Limits above reflect WhatsApp's published catalog behaviour as of July 2026 and are revised by Meta from time to time. Redood imports a menu from a restaurant's existing delivery-marketplace listing, which handles name-length and category mapping during setup rather than leaving it as manual work.