A digital menu is not a PDF with a QR code stuck on it. Done properly it is a live page you control: prices change in seconds, sold-out dishes vanish, photos sell the high-margin plates, and every scan tells you something. This guide covers what to include, what it costs, and how to move your existing menu online without retyping a single dish.
| PDF behind a QR | Hosted digital menu | |
|---|---|---|
| Change a price | Re-export, re-upload, sometimes reprint | Edit and save — live instantly |
| Sold-out dish | Guest orders it anyway | Toggle off, disappears at once |
| Reads on a phone | Pinch and zoom | Built for a phone screen |
| Photos | Blow up the file size | Loaded per dish, lazily |
| Ordering | Not possible | Add to cart, sent to the table's waiter |
| Data | None | Scans, devices, times, orders per code |
A photo lifts orders on the item it sits next to more than any wording change. Start with your ten highest-margin dishes rather than shooting the whole menu.
The single biggest advantage over paper: mark a dish sold out at 8pm and it disappears instantly, so no guest orders something you cannot serve.
Guests scroll on a phone, not a page. Sticky category tabs that jump straight to Starters, Grills or Drinks keep long menus usable.
Set the currency once at the restaurant level so every branch and every guest sees the correct symbol and formatting.
Vegetarian, vegan, halal, nut-free. These answer the questions your waiters get asked most, before anyone has to ask.
A menu that only displays is a brochure. If the guest can add to a cart and send the order to the table's waiter, the same page starts earning.
The reason most restaurants stall is the typing. A 90-item menu retyped by hand is an evening of work, and it has to be redone every time the kitchen changes. Skip it: photograph each page of the menu, or upload the PDF you send to your printer, and let the import read the dish names, descriptions and prices, then group them into categories. Review the result, fix the handful it misreads, generate photos for the dishes that have none, and publish.
Keep the first version small if you are unsure. One branch, one menu, live QR codes on ten tables. You will learn more from a week of real scans than from a month of planning.
Judge the price against one covered table. If a digital menu adds a single dessert or drink per shift, it has usually paid for itself. Be wary of two things: per-order commissions, which quietly scale with your success, and hardware requirements, which lock you into a vendor. Grizfy charges a flat monthly price from $29, takes no cut of your orders, and needs no hardware beyond the phones your guests already carry.
A digital menu is your menu hosted at a web address, opened on the guest's phone — usually by scanning a QR code at the table or in the window. Unlike a PDF, it can be edited instantly, mark dishes sold out, show photos, and take orders.
Yes, in almost every way that matters. A PDF is a fixed file: it pinches and zooms badly on phones, cannot be edited once the QR code is printed, shows nothing about availability, and gives you no data. A hosted digital menu fixes all four.
Free tools exist but usually just host a PDF. Restaurant-grade platforms typically run from about $20 to $80 per month per venue. Grizfy starts at $29 per month with a 7-day free trial, and includes hosting, QR codes, ordering and analytics.
You do not have to retype it. In Grizfy you upload photos or a PDF of your current menu and the AI import reads it, then arranges categories, dish names, descriptions and prices for you. You review and edit before publishing, and can generate missing dish photos with AI.
No. Grizfy sits on top of the POS you already use and passes orders to it, so there is no migration, no new hardware and no retraining your cashiers.
Yes. Each branch can carry its own categories, prices and availability while sharing your brand, which matters when one location runs breakfast and another does not.
Upload your existing menu, let Grizfy arrange it, and publish a branded digital menu with QR codes. 7-day free trial, no POS migration.