Digital menu boards for restaurants: the screen is the cheap part

Your counter screen is still advertising the Christmas menu and it is now February. Nobody on shift knows the login for the software that draws it. The laptop it was configured on left with an assistant manager who moved to Leeds, and the installer wants a chargeable site visit before he will touch four prices. Screens reach that state in their second year more often than anyone selling them admits, and almost none of it is a hardware fault.

What is a digital menu board?

A digital menu board is a commercial display above a counter, fed by a small media player and a piece of layout software, showing dishes and prices that can be edited from a laptop rather than reprinted. It replaces the printed panel or the lightbox insert. It replaces nothing else.

Holding that line keeps the project cheap. The panel is an output device: it draws what the software tells it to, when the schedule says so. Knowing the lamb ran out at 20:40, taking money, or remembering the man who buys the same wrap every Thursday are jobs for other systems, each with a separate bill.

What are you actually buying?

Five things, and most quotes itemise four. A commercial panel is typically quoted between £400 and £900 depending on diagonal and brightness. After that come a media player, a bracket rated for the weight, a licence for the layout software, and an installation visit with power and data run behind the plasterboard.

The fifth line is labour, and it never appears on the quote: somebody in your building has to open that software and change it. That is the line which decides whether the investment survives its second winter, because a board nobody on site can edit is a printed board with a monthly bill attached.

Two physical details are worth pinning before you sign. A consumer television mounted above a grill runs hot and dims early, which is why commercial panels are rated for longer daily duty. And a player left on automatic updates will pick a Saturday lunchtime to restart, so establish who controls that schedule before the bracket goes up.

Who changes the board on a Tuesday morning?

Whoever can do it in under 2 minutes from a phone, or nobody does. The strongest predictor of whether digital menu boards for restaurants keep earning their keep is the number of steps standing between the person who knows the new price and the glass showing the old one.

Count those steps in whatever demo you are shown. If a price change means opening a design file, exporting an image, uploading it to a player and waiting on a sync, you have bought a slow way to print that also charges you every month. If it means editing one field and closing the laptop, you have bought the thing you thought you were buying.

Which is also why the panel should not be where your prices live. Give the ordering menu the number and let the signage show it, and a supplier increase becomes one edit instead of a reconciliation exercise across the room.

Do UK menu boards need to show calories and allergens?

In England, businesses with 250 or more employees must show calorie information at the point of choice, and menu boards are named alongside menus, online ordering pages and third-party delivery listings. That comes from the Calorie Labelling (Out of Home Sector) (England) Regulations 2021, in force since April 2022, along with the statement that adults need around 2,000 kcal a day. Independent restaurants below that headcount sit outside the rule, though landlords and delivery partners increasingly ask anyway.

Allergens are a separate duty and it applies to everyone. The official allergen guidance for food businesses lists 14 declarable allergens, and a guest must be able to get accurate information before they commit to the order. A surface read from four metres back is the worst place in the building for that. It has room for a dish name, a price and a calorie figure, not 14 columns of small type.

The split most kitchens settle on is calories on the glass where the law asks for them, and the detail on the page a code sends people to. There, each item can carry a full description, its options and add-ons with their own prices, and the required choices the kitchen can actually trust.

What a digital menu board still cannot do

It cannot take the order. That sentence is the entire gap between signage and an ordering system, and it is where the money goes. A screen persuades somebody, then hands them back to a queue, a phone call, or a marketplace app that keeps their number.

Put a code beside the glass and the sequence finishes properly. A code is generated for every table and one more for the wall; scanning opens an ordinary web page with no app to install, and the basket takes a name and a number before checkout. Every line is then re-priced from your live menu at checkout, so a page left open at lunchtime still charges the evening figure. Counts per item fall as orders arrive, an option can run dry without killing the whole dish, and an item at zero removes itself with nobody watching the shelf. The moment the basket closes, 3 messages leave together. The customer gets a confirmation with a real arrival time, a ticket lands in the managers' WhatsApp group, and anything going out gets a rider dispatch carrying the GPS pin dropped at checkout.

What happens after the order is the half no screen reaches. Regulars collect stamps and grow into tiers that carry an automatic discount, and a Google Wallet card (with a designer for the card's colours and logo) puts the reward in the phone they already carry. Offers stay disciplined: ten kinds of upsell, from pairings to ladders to spend thresholds, and two of them landing on one basket resolve to the single best discount rather than compounding into a loss. The books close themselves, with a sales dashboard by day, item and channel showing which board item genuinely sold rather than which one you were fond of.

The alternative that screen quietly recommends is expensive. Send the reader to a marketplace listing instead, and £8,000 of monthly orders at a 30% commission is £2,400 gone before rent, on identical food cooked by identical people.

"A price on a wall is a promise you have to physically go and correct. We built the ordering side so the wall can be a week out of date without costing anybody a refund at the counter. The number that matters is recalculated the second the basket closes."

— Anzul Aqeel, founder of Get Menu

One screen, three services

Dayparts are the best argument for a screen and the one showrooms demonstrate least. A single panel can hold a breakfast board until 11:30, a lunch board until 16:00 and an evening board after that. That is three printed panels you no longer own, and three swaps nobody has to remember on a wet Monday.

Ask to see the schedule editor rather than the animation reel. What matters is whether a 09:00 edit to the lunch layout lands without anyone touching the shop floor. Does a missed sync leave the glass black or on yesterday, and does the ordering page run on the same clock? A board advertising breakfast to a storefront that stopped accepting breakfast at 11:00 is a complaint being written in advance. That is why opening hours are enforced on the ordering side, with a minimum order value and an auto-confirm timer for the half hour when both hands are full.

Getting a board and a live menu running in the same week

Start with the menu and let the panel follow it, because the panel is a view of the menu and never the reverse. If the prices already sit in a spreadsheet, upload the whole list from a spreadsheet instead of typing 90 items into a form, then drag the categories into the order a hungry person reads them in.

Then take the decision about ink. Anything you would hold at the same price until the next VAT quarter can carry its figure on the glass; anything seasonal keeps its name and its photograph up there and its price on the page. Make the two surfaces look like one business; 57 colour themes and a font picker exist for exactly that. If a code is going onto the wall, generate it in the designer. It holds contrast high enough to scan under evening lighting, then emails a print pack ready for the printer.

The trial runs 15 days with no card taken, long enough to put a new board through two full weekends before anybody signs. Two housekeeping facts before you begin: you can export the customer list on any day you choose, the last one included, and the detail attached to old orders is cleared once it passes 120 days.

Frequently asked questions

Is a digital menu board worth it for one small restaurant?

Work it out on reprints rather than on the demo. Say three printed panels cost £250 each to redesign and print, changed four times a year, is £3,000 annually and four waits for the print shop. At that tempo a screen and a licence win comfortably. Change them twice a year and they do not; good print plus a code that opens a live page serves you better.

Can a digital menu board pull prices automatically from my ordering system?

Some signage platforms offer a feed, but most hold their own copy of your menu, which is precisely how a screen and a cash register end up disagreeing. Our own position, stated plainly: there is no dedicated signage product in Get Menu. What a browser on that screen can do is hold the storefront open and show the live page at size, which keeps one set of prices in the building without paying for a second content system.

Does my menu board have to show calorie counts?

Only if the business employs 250 or more people and operates in England, under the 2021 out-of-home calorie labelling regulations. Below that threshold it is voluntary. Allergen information is different. The duty to give accurate information on all 14 declarable allergens applies whatever your size, and a board is rarely the right surface for it.

How do customers pay if they order from a code beside the board?

They pay in cash or on the card machine you already have, at the counter or at the door. There are no online payments to configure, which is deliberate, and it means no card number ever enters the system for anyone to steal.

What size screen and how many items should go on it?

A 43-inch to 55-inch commercial panel suits most single counters, and the test for the lettering is simple: stand where the guest stands and try to read it. Keep each category short enough to take in at a glance.