The QR code menu, done properly

The problem isn't the QR code. It's what's behind it

Since 2020 the QR code on the table has become the norm, and almost every time it opens the same thing: a PDF. It's the quickest choice to make and the worst to use. Here's what happens to the customer:

• The PDF has to download: on a slow connection that's ten or fifteen seconds of seeing nothing.
• It opens as a full page, with text the size of ants: they have to pinch to zoom in and drag left and right just to read one line.
• You can't search for a dish, you can't tap anything.
• Google doesn't read it: as far as search is concerned, that menu doesn't exist.

The result: people at the table call the waiter anyway, and people deciding from home close it and check out the place next door.

A well-made digital menu isn't a PDF on the internet. It's a page, with the items one below the other, that you read with your thumb.

What a proper digital menu has to do

1. Open in under two seconds

It's the thing that matters most of all. Someone sitting down is hungry and short of patience; someone standing outside has even less. A light page with images that only load when they're needed opens in under a second, even with one bar of signal.

2. Be readable without zooming in

Normal-sized text, a single column, categories you can tap. If you have to zoom in to read it, the menu is wrong.

3. Say what's in it

Ingredients and allergens under every dish. It's not just courtesy: EU Regulation 1169/2011 on food information requires allergen information to be available to the customer. Having it in writing takes responsibility off you, and saves you questions.

4. Be updatable in thirty seconds

Prices change, dishes run out, the fish depends on what's at the market. If you have to call someone to change a figure, after two months the online menu is out of date, and an out-of-date menu is worse than no menu at all.

5. Live on your own website, not on a platform

Many services rent you a digital menu: you pay every month, and the menu sits at an address like menu.service.com/your-place. It isn't yours, it brings nothing to your website, and if you stop paying it disappears. The menu should live on your own domain: it's content that works for you on Google too.

The printed QR code: four mistakes to avoid

1. Too small. Under 2.5 cm a side, many phones struggle. On a table, 3 cm is the right size.
2. No label. “Scan for the menu” under the code doubles the percentage of people who use it.
3. Glossy lamination. Under a lamp it reflects the light and the camera can't read it. Matt is better.
4. A shortened address that expires. Use an address of your own, like yourplace.it/menu: it lasts forever and you can even write it by hand.

Yes, you still need a paper menu

The QR code doesn't replace the paper menu, it sits alongside it. Some people have a flat battery, some can't see well, some just can't be bothered. Since 2022 many places have gone back to keeping both, and it's the right choice: the QR code is mostly for people who aren't seated yet: the ones who are deciding where to go.

The real payoff is outside the restaurant

A well-made online menu works in three places:

• On the table, as an alternative to the paper menu.
• On Google, where people searching “pizzeria + your town” read the dishes and prices before they choose.
• On WhatsApp, when someone sends the link to the group: “look at this”.

The third is the one restaurant owners underestimate most, and it's the one that fills the Saturday tables.

How we do it

The menu is part of the website, not an attachment: categories, dishes, prices, allergens and photos, all updatable from your phone. The same content feeds the QR code you put on the tables, so you only update it once. In the restaurant demo the menu can be filtered by course and you tap a dish to see it: it's the simplest example of what a menu that isn't a PDF can do.

To see how it behaves in real life, open the restaurant demo or the takeaway pizzeria one, where the menu becomes an order too.