In the current climate containing Coronavirus and lockdowns, restaurants have been forced to adapt and overcome many different challenges to remain open and as free-flowing as possible. In the majority of countries, restaurants were forced to close their doors meaning they weren’t able to sit people down inside or out and conduct business as normal. To begin with, takeaways were the obvious business change but as lockdown started to slowly lift restaurants could finally reopen and start serving food once more.
The reopen did mean, however, that social norms had to change and even the simplest of tasks like reading a menu had to change. To prevent the cross-contamination of Covid-19 physical menus were dashed to the side and something else had to take their place. Enter the digital menu.
While these changes came easily for some, there were restaurant owners that didn’t cope too well with the digitalisation of their service. Here we are going to take a look into the process of offering a digital menu for your customers to browse while dining in.
Write Your Menu Using A Digital Application
First of all, you’re going to need your menu to be readable from any smart device. This means the first step you’re going to have to take is writing it using one of the many tools available to you on your computer. Google Docs, Microsoft Office and Notion are three examples of tools used to write and design menus. The chances are you already have a digital copy of your menu stored on your computer so you can print it out as and when you need extras, it’s rare to find handwritten menus.
Once you have this and you’re happy with the way it looks, the colour scheme, presentation and your offerings, you’ll have to save it to work out how you want a customer to get hold of it.
How Can You Offer Your Menu To The Customer?
This really is the most important decision you’re going to have to make regarding the offering of your menu to customers. Do you want to allow customers to access your menu using a QR code or would you like to offer a large menu at the front of your restaurant displayed on a television screen? Whatever the case might be, digital professionals from www.yodeck.com point out that digital signage is one of the best ways to advertise your products. You no longer need to have the same dated menus that stay the same until an entire change. Instead, you can change the look of your menu throughout the day depending on the time and what you’re offering.
It’s a simple task that requires each and every menu you offer to be stored online using cloud storage which is offered by a whole host of companies, and once it’s up it’s an easy process of clicking and choosing which you’d like to be shown on the screen.
Generate Your Own QR Codes
When it comes to using a QR code it will mean your customers will have to have a certain amount of tech knowledge to access your menu, they must also have a smartphone or device that reads them. There are plenty of online applications that offer free QR code generators and it really is as easy as 1-2-3. You can generate a QR code for each table that tells the waiting staff which table has ordered.
It’s an easy process – walk up to a restaurant, sit down, get your smartphone out, open the camera, scan the QR code, order what you want, and if you have your bank linked to the NFC chip in your phone, pay with ease. Never has ordering food and drinks been easier. This trend will stick around long after Covid-19 has disappeared.
Use Your Website
If you’re thinking of reining in the technological experience of your restaurant but still want the option of someone looking at your menu online at the table then look no further than having it posted on your website. Simply, have a page that offers either a PDF download or a simple picture of your menu, accessible from the welcome page of your site. There are loads of options you can utilise here, offer discounts, specials, even giveaways, and the more traffic your website has the more likely you’ll be full at dinner service.
The future is digital so it was only a matter of time before we were ordering our food from our mobile phones. This trend, and the digitalisation of food businesses, will be around and evolving for the foreseeable future. Imagine a world where we can walk into a restaurant and order just by looking at a screen, no touching, no speaking, just with our eyes. It isn’t far off, the technical revolution has begun.
