Universal Menu Icons
Recently our product and engineering team equipped our websites with some new tools to display icons on menus. These icons are an alternative to the dietary, allergen and spice-rating tags we already had in place. Some customers prefer these icons over written words because they are more concise and often elevate the design of a menu.
A new challenge presented itself when we increased our menu tags from 17 to 54 different options. Initially we were working with an abbreviation based system but that proved to be too confusing. For example “V” could stand for vegetarian or vegan while “K” could be keto or kosher. Not to mention this direction would only work for diners who can read in English. The solution we came up with was creating an illustrative icon with supplemental symbols. An icon may include a plus sign to indicate whether a dish has the ability to meet a certain diet type, or a slash if it is completely free of a specific allergen. The evolution of that can be seen above.
When searching for inspiration for our menu icons we noticed how much the same icon can differ between restaurants. A great example of this was the shellfish icon. During our exploration we tried visually representing shellfish with a crab, a mollusk and even a sea shell before we landed on shrimp. This is when we had the realization that a system this comprehensive did not yet exist for menu icons, and we set out to create a universal library. Imagine these menu icons being used by restaurants all over the world! You can see them in action here.
