The dining experience often starts with “what do they have (on their menu)” and/or “where is it” before arriving at your restaurant.
The history of paper menus
The menu first appeared in China during the second half of the 18th century or The Romantic Age. Customers ate what the house was serving that day. The owner wrote down the unseen dishes on paper for the customers to choose. We’ve been using paper menus for around 300 years.
Nowadays, few owners will write their menus. Restaurants invest time and money on professionals to create a nice looking menu with elegant descriptions and then get these menus printed. A menu is updated an average of 3 times a year in order to adapt to customer needs. The costs incurred from this exercise is from hundreds to thousands of dollars which don’t even include the costs of the limitations (eg. insights to which menus items people ignore and why).
There are currently about 43,000 cafes and restaurants in Australia. If each restaurant printed 50 single page menus and updates their menu 3 times a year, that would require 29 tonnes of paper (4.5 grams/paper menu) to be produced. This means that between 300 and 500 trees to are cut down just to produce this paper each year.
Limitations of paper menus
Paper menus have helped countless restaurants and customers over the last 300 years. Restaurants create beautiful menus to make their brand stand out and carefully craft each menu item description to attract the diner. The layout of the menu is also considered in hopes to sell some high-profit dishes.
But in our dynamic world where almost everything is influenced by the pace of technological change, are paper menus becoming more of a burden than a benefit today? Let’s take a look:
- Hard to capture customers’ attention. Based on a research conducted by OpenTable, 86% of customers regularly check out menus online before they dine out. In a restaurant, customers don’t “read” the paper menus, they just quickly scan them. This means that a menu has a small amount of time to make a big impact. Is this short window of time worth cutting down hundreds of trees?
- Slow to update. No one wants to keep items on the menu that don’t sell well, but it costs time and money to change the menu. When the ingredients run out for a popular dish, the wait staff need to remember to tell each new customer “Sorry, it’s sold out”, instead of having a more productive conversation like “Would you like to hear about our daily specials?” or “Can I talk you through some of our favourite dishes?”. Customers will often feel disappointed if their desired dish isn’t available and will need another 5 minutes to make another decision.
- Need a separate specials board. To keep customers coming back and attract a new crowd, restaurants create new dishes. Instead of updating the entire paper menu, restaurants always create a specials menu which may take 1–2 hours to print or write out on a chalkboard every day. Another problem with “specials board” is that you don’t know if people even bothered to look at your specials or just didn’t know there were any specials.
- Paper gets ruined easily. A freshly printed menu looks much more professional than an oil stain menu. However, restaurants can’t completely protect the paper menu from water, food, a naughty kids or usual expected wear. Paper is so fragile. If you’ve got plastic covers on each page, now your staff have to spend additional time cleaning the covers.
- Inflation of costs to produce the menu. Digital is changing the way we see the world. 21.2% of restaurants forecast menu cost inflation is 2.1%1 to 2.5% (USA, 2014). Printing is getting more expensive as other industries move to digital. Fairfax Media, the leading multi-platform media company in Australasia, would likely move its metropolitan papers to digital-only publishing.
Digital menus
Over the past few years, restaurants have started to recognise the benefits of the internet, search and social media.
Customers can find photos of restaurant and cafe dishes on social media, open a food app (eg. Zomato, Trip Advisor, etc) and/or go to the restaurant’s websites to browse the PDF menus (see Diagram 1, left image). There are so many places today to find where to eat. Why not make life a whole lot easier by managing your menu from one place and have it automatically stay up-to-date across multiple websites (see Diagram 1, right image)?
A paper menu only tells customers about the dishes you have to offer at a fixed point in time. The same goes for the PDF version of your menu that gets uploaded to one or more websites/apps. But a truly digital menu is more powerful and centralised. Imagine all the time your business could save by only having to update your menu once (see left image in Diagram 1) and it gets seen everywhere (eg. Facebook, Zomato, etc). Most importantly, it’s been designed for anyone to update your digital menu anytime, anywhere. No “IT” team is required.
Benefits of a digital menu
- Better ROI (return on investment). Your time and money goes a lot further with a digital menu. It can be browsed by millions of customers online without the complexity of a printed menu and can provide meaningful insights in real-time. For example, the restaurant owner can better predict which dishes will sell based on the engagement on their menu before lunch/dinner service. With the an online menu like Atumio, your ongoing costs are minimal and maybe even free.
- Flexible to change. It’s easy and quick to update a digital menu. When the restaurant wants to add a daily special, they just take a photo and add a few details. If a dish has just sold out, it can easily be archived or reflected as sold out online in seconds.
- More attractive with real photos. Dish photos and recommendations can help 85% of customers order dishes. Adding mouth-watering photos of your dishes will bring more customers in and make their ordering process easier and faster.
- Better serve customers. It’s hard for a wait staff to suggest the appropriate dessert or drink to each customer. But a digital menu can make it. If a customer always orders apple pie with iced tea, the digital menu will display the iced tea in the apple pie page for this customer, so that he/ she doesn’t need to search it in the menu.
- On demand translation of your menu. 8.6 million visitor arrivals in Australia for year ending July 2017. Almost 60% of them came from a non-English speaking country. But a digital multilingual menu can serve customers from different countries by reducing the communication barriers of a traditional paper menu
Conclusion
A well-designed digital menu helps a restaurant gain exposure online, increase awareness about their brand and offerings and improve the customer’s dining experience before, during and after their visit. It is also time and cost-effective for a restaurant whilst enabling them to keep up with the continually increasing demands of the diner.
Most importantly, a truly digital menu is more eco-friendly, enables restaurants to gain a deeper understanding of the success of their menu offerings and empowers them to cook they way they did 300 years ago because the internet allows us to quickly spread.
So can paper menus really compete with a truly digital menu?
Want to learn more about how a digital multilingual menu can work for your restaurant? Get in touch with hello@atumio.com and follow the conversation at Medium, Facebook and Instagram.
