Restaurant owners and managers need to develop the flexibility of an Olympic gymnast to remain in business during this COVID-19 pandemic, so every edge becomes essential.

Whether your restaurant is focusing on takeaways, a hybrid takeaway and seated model, online ordering, or exclusively dine-in, an electronic menu has many advantages beyond the obvious. That is not only in the time of COVID-19 but beyond this current crisis too.

How Do MyIQMenu Digital Menus Work?

Your digital menu is accessed on your customers’ personal device – desktop, smartphone, or tablet. There is no requirement for an app, just a click of a link or a scan of a QR code from your phone camera, and your customers have access to a custom-branded menu.

How Do You Cut Costs With Your Digital Menu?

Printed menus have had their place for decades. However, they come with some headaches in terms of costs.

Print Costs – Zero

There is the actual cost of print which can be expensive considering you want your menu to be the best quality it can be. However, once you commit to print, you can’t change things quickly and easily, even though:

Prices may change.

Products may become unavailable (out of stock or out of season).

Grammar and spelling mistakes may have crept in.

You want to change things up for special occasions such as Ramadan or Christmas.

Use a digital menu, and you can make all the changes you want at any time with zero additional costs. Now there is something to celebrate! The ability to tweak your menu on the fly, as things change on the floor or in the kitchen. Talk about being the gymnast of restaurant management!

Printed restaurant menus also have a specific shelf life. After a while, pages get torn or spilt on, edges start to fray, and they generally lose their shine. That costly leather binding doesn’t have the same effect when it’s peeling. It’s not a good look for your brand! Digital menus, on the other hand, don’t age at all. In fact, they improve with age as technology develops. They always look good, backlit images “pop”, it’s always up-to-date and can be customized to reflect your brand beautifully.

Printed menus are not friendly to trees either. One of the ways to become more environmentally friendly is to convert to a digital menu—a win-win for everyone.

Photography Costs – Zero

Images used for a printed restaurant menu can date quickly and need to be high resolution for print. That often means professional photography, which comes with a professional expense. A digital menu does not require high resolution, professional photography, and you can make use of digital cropping, filtering, and adjustment tools yourself, to bring the mouth-watering images of your dishes to life, quickly, easily, and regularly. You can shoot these images from your phone or even use user-generated images (run competitions to have your customers shoot their dishes to include in your menu).

Images are so important when it comes to food; your customers love to see what their dish looks like to remove any doubt about their choice. It also helps customers to access portion size and order within their needs, reducing food wastage by not ordering dishes that are too large or avoiding disappointment by ordering dishes that might not be enough.

Sanitization Costs – Zero

Printed menus are difficult and time-consuming to sanitize effectively every time they have been used. Your waiters are busy enough as it is, who needs to add yet another thing to their long to-do list? By using a digital menu, this hurdle no longer exists—zero sanitization costs, in terms of actual sanitizer, and staff time.

Excellent, a cost-cutting exercise can provide relief to any restaurant!