How to set up a QR menu for a café

Entering the menu

Enter the menu in the order the guest reads it, not the order the items occur to you — categories first, then the items inside each, then the options on the items that need them. The category list is the map the guest scrolls; eight to twelve categories is a menu, twenty-five is a filing system.

Two disciplines save the most time later. Name items the way the kitchen says them, because the same names travel to the kitchen ticket and the kitchen board. And enter the options while the item is in front of you — size, milk, extras — rather than as a cleanup project after opening; an option group defined once can serve every item that needs it.

Decide early what you will not put in — the phone screen rewards the menu you actually sell, not every dish the kitchen has ever made.

Photos

Photographs carry a phone menu in a way print never asked them to — the guest enlarges the plate, and the picture answers the question the description cannot. The good news is that the bar is consistency, not artistry: one plain background, daylight or a window, the dish from above, the whole plate in frame. Fifty photographs from one afternoon on one phone look like a menu; fifty taken over three months do not.

Shoot before you open, while the kitchen is calm and a plate can be re-shot twice without a service waiting behind it. A missing photo is a bare grey square on the guest's phone — honest, but it sells the dish beside it instead of the one it belongs to.

Allergens, options and languages

Allergen tagging is the part of a QR menu that touches people's health, and it deserves the most boring approach available — tag what the kitchen knows, item by item, from the recipe rather than from memory, and leave untagged what you have not checked. A filter that hides nuts is a promise as good as the tagging behind it; an item you have not checked should carry no tag at all, because the honest gap is safer than a guess.

Options follow the same one-time rule. A milk group, a size group, an extras group with prices — defined once, reused everywhere, so the guest chooses and the till prices.

Languages are manual work, and worth planning as a batch rather than a mood. Translate the categories, the best sellers and every allergen first — that is the part that matters when a guest with an allergy opens the menu in a language they trust — and leave the rest for quieter weeks.

Printing and placing the codes

The code itself is the least of it — generated per table, downloaded as an image, printed as a sticker, a stand or the back of the table number. What matters is placement, and placement is a physical test rather than a decision: scan every code yourself, from where a guest would sit, at the angle a guest would hold a phone, before the room fills.

Weather and cleaning decide the medium. Laminated cards survive tables; stickers survive doors; an unlaminated card on an outside table survives until the first rain. Contrast matters more than size — a quiet two-tone code scans better than a large decorative one that fights its own background.

Kafe360 generates a permanent code per table, resizes item photos on upload, and carries ten languages you translate by hand with fallback to the base one — so the sticker on the table outlives every price change, every new photo and every translation you add later.

The first week

The technology is ready on day one; the room is not. The first week is a staff exercise wearing a technology hat. Tell the floor what the code does and what it does not do — no guest payment, no guest accounts — so the answer to can I pay on this is settled before a guest asks it.

Watch the first scans happen. Where do guests hesitate — the landing page, the category list, the item detail? The hesitations of week one are the menu's real usability report, and they are cheap to fix while the menu is young.

Keep the paper menus for the week, visible and unashamed. A phone menu covers almost everyone; the guest with a flat battery and the guest who will not scan both eat tonight, and the paper bridge keeps them on side.

At the end of the week, look at whatever your system can tell you about how often the menu was opened — a menu on phones leaves a trail paper never did.