Making a QR code menu is not the hard part — any free generator will turn a link into a square. The hard part is what the square points at, and whether it is still right in three months. This is the order that works, and the four decisions that cost people the most when they get them wrong.
What you need before you start
Three things, and none of them is a designer. Your current menu in any form — a printed card, a photo of the board, a Word file. A phone with a working camera. And thirty minutes when the kitchen is quiet.
You do not need photographs of every dish to begin. A menu with names and prices and no pictures still beats a laminated card that is out of date, and pictures can be added a few at a time afterwards. Waiting until you have photographed forty dishes is the most common reason a restaurant never starts.
Step 1 — Get the menu in, not perfect
Type the dishes, or paste the whole menu at once and let it split into categories and items. Both work; pasting is faster if you already have the text anywhere.
Keep the categories the way your kitchen thinks about them, not the way a website would. If your staff say "farsan" and "punjabi", use those. The menu is read by people who are about to ask a waiter a question, and the words should match the answer they get.
Step 2 — Photograph the ten dishes that matter
Not all of them. The ones you make the most money on, and the ones people ask about before ordering. A photograph earns its place where a name does not explain the dish — a visitor cannot tell a rotla from a thepla, and nobody knows what your house special looks like until they see it.
Daylight near a window, plate on a plain surface, camera slightly above and to one side. That is the whole technique. Photographs taken on a phone in daylight look better than studio photographs taken of food that has gone cold.
Step 3 — Decide what the QR code is for
This is the decision people get wrong. A QR code can do two different jobs and they need different codes.
A menu code shows the food and nothing else. It belongs on your visiting card, your Instagram bio, your shop window and your Google listing — anywhere somebody might be deciding whether to come.
A table code knows which table it is on. Orders from it arrive labelled, so nobody has to carry a number across the room. These belong on the tables and nowhere else — a table code on a card in somebody's wallet will one day send food to table 6.
If you do takeaway, a third kind: a counter code that asks for a name instead of a table number, because a name is how a parcel gets handed over.
Step 4 — Print, and print bigger than you think
- One code per table, not one per room. The point of the table code is that it knows the table.
- At least 3 cm across, printed dark on a light background. Codes below that fail on older phones, and half your customers have older phones.
- On the table, not on the wall. A camera pointed at a wall across the room is a camera pointed at somebody else's dinner.
- Laminated or in a stand. A paper code that gets wiped down with the table lasts about a week.
- Keep a spare set. Codes get taken home by children and spilt on by adults.
The four things people get wrong
Pointing the code at a PDF. A PDF opens as a document you have to pinch and drag on a phone, and it cannot be changed without generating a new file. Half the QR menus in India are PDFs, which is why so many people say QR menus are annoying. They are right — about PDFs.
Regenerating the code when the menu changes. The code should point at a page, not at a version. If you have to reprint the codes to change a price, you have built the same problem as a printed menu, with an extra step.
One code for everything. See step 3. The card in a customer's pocket should not be able to send an order to a table.
Waiting for the menu to be finished. It is never finished. Put it up with names and prices, add photographs as you go, and let the first week of real customers tell you which dishes needed a picture.
After the first service
Look at which dishes were opened and which were not. That list is different from your sales list, and where they disagree is where the money is: a dish people look at and do not order has a price or a description problem, and a dish nobody opens is buried in the wrong category.
Then fix the two worst photographs. That is the whole maintenance routine.
Questions people ask
Do I need a website first?
No. The menu is the page. You need somewhere for the code to point, and a digital menu service gives you that — a website is a separate thing you may or may not want later.
Can I use a free QR code generator?
For the square itself, yes — a QR code is just an encoded link and there is nothing to pay for. What matters is what it points at. A free generator pointing at a PDF gives you a menu you cannot edit; the code is free, the problem is downstream of it.
What if a customer's phone will not scan it?
Nearly always the code is too small or the light is bad. Print at 3 cm or larger, dark ink on light paper, and keep it flat. Every camera app on phones sold in the last several years reads QR codes without any app.
How long does the whole thing take?
About half an hour to a menu customers can use, if you have your prices to hand. Photographs take longer and can be done over a fortnight while the menu is already live.
Read next
MenuDekho builds digital and QR code menus for restaurants across Gujarat — Ahmedabad, Surat, Rajkot, Vadodara and everywhere else. Every plan starts with a free 30-day trial.