How to Create a Digital Menu: 10 Steps to a QR Menu (2026)
Most owners think going digital means retyping the whole menu on a Tuesday night. It doesn't. The fastest route starts with the menu you already print — a photo of it — and ends with a live page your guests read in their own language.
TL;DR — Key Takeaways
Photograph it, don't type it. Upload photos or a PDF of the menu you already print and let the AI draft the dishes. You review; you don't transcribe.
A digital dish carries what paper can't. Price, description, photo, the 14 EU allergens, diet labels, calories, sizes and extras — all of it filterable and translatable.
Allergens are the part that has to be right. A menu that treats an untagged dish as safe is worse than a printed one. A good filter refuses to make that promise.
A language is only worth offering when it's actually readable. Half a translated menu sends a guest somewhere worse than where they started.
The QR code is the last step, not the first. Print it once, at least 3 cm wide, and never reprint it again — the code points at the menu, not a copy of it.
Watch: Intermenu in 60 seconds
▶ Watch the 60-second film on YouTube: a one-minute tour of Intermenu, from printed menu to live menu. The restaurant shown, Aurora Bistro, is a demo menu.
What "digitizing your menu" actually means
There are two versions of this project and they are not the same size.
The small version is a PDF of your menu on your website. It's better than nothing and it took an afternoon in 2015. It also can't be filtered, can't be translated, can't be corrected when the fish sells out at 8pm, and is close to unreadable on a phone.
The real version is a menu that lives at its own web address and behaves like software. When the kitchen 86s the sea bass, you tap once and it's gone from the next guest's screen. When a Dutch couple sits down, they read it in Dutch. When someone with a nut allergy opens the filter, the dishes that might hurt them disappear and the ones nobody has tagged are held aside with a warning instead of being quietly passed off as safe.
That's the version worth your afternoon. This guide walks the whole path, in the order I'd actually do it.
Start by photographing, not typing
This is the step that changes the size of the whole project, so do it first.
Take photos of your printed menu with your phone, or upload the PDF your designer sent you. In Intermenu you can send up to five JPG, PNG, WebP or PDF files in one import — a PDF can run to twelve pages, and a single import up to sixteen pages in total. The file count, types and sizes are checked before anything uploads, so a wrong file tells you immediately instead of after a two-minute wait.
Then the AI reads it. For every dish it captures the section it sits under, its name, its description and its price as printed. It also reads the structure a printed menu expresses through layout rather than words. A line like S 8,00 / M 10,00 / L 12,00 becomes one dish with three sizes, not three separate dishes. Toppings printed under a burger become add-ons that add to its price.
What matters just as much is what happens to the reads it isn't sure about. Every dish carries a confidence score, and the uncertain ones are routed to you rather than published on trust. The review screen sorts everything into three tabs —Needs you (a missing or unclear price, a dish with no section or name, a price of zero, a low-confidence read), Looks good, and Set aside for things like a daily special that shouldn't live on the permanent menu.
The detail that saves the most time: opening a dish shows the source photo beside it with the region the dish was read from marked. Checking a price is a glance, not a hunt through a PDF.
If you already keep your menu in a spreadsheet, there's a separate path — a seven-column Excel template you fill in and upload, with a preview showing exactly how many dishes will be added, updated and skipped before a single row is written. Worth knowing that the spreadsheet route deliberately never touches allergens, photos, choice groups or translations, so a bulk price update doesn't wipe out the detail you spent an evening adding.
Full walkthrough of both routes: turn a PDF or photo menu into a digital one.
What a digital dish carries that a printed one can't
Once the dishes exist, each one becomes a small record rather than a line of text. Beyond name, description and price, a dish can hold:
A photo— the strongest thing on any menu item, and the one most menus skip.
Allergens from the 14 EU-regulated list, shown to guests as a "Contains …" line.
Diet labels like vegan and vegetarian, which drive the diet filter.
Calories, shown as a plain "N kcal".
A story— 60 to 120 words on where the recipe came from or why it's on the menu. Guests open it from the dish.
Spice level, preparation notes ("wood-fired", "slow-cooked") and serving times ("weekdays until 3 pm").
Sold out, which takes effect immediately with no save.
You add a dish in three short steps — Basics, then Allergens & photo, then Choices & extras — and it goes live the moment you save it. There is no separate publish step for a dish, which catches people out pleasantly.
The daily-use features matter more than the field list. The dishes page shows 25 at a time and lets you filter to the exceptions — everything sold out, everything missing a photo. You can select several dishes and mark them sold out together, put them back together, or move all your base prices by a percentage, which is how a 5% drinks increase takes thirty seconds instead of an evening.
How many dishes, and in what order
Going digital tempts people to add. The menu no longer costs a print run, so why not put the old specials back on? Resist that, because the constraint that made your printed menu good was never the paper.
A guest scanning a phone reads less than a guest holding a card, not more. Roughly five to seven items per section is the commonly cited sweet spot, and it holds up: past that, people stop choosing and start scrolling, and the dish that wins is the one they recognize rather than the one you make money on.
Order matters as much as count. On a printed menu the eye lands top-center, then top-right, then top-left — the "golden triangle" that menu designers build around. A phone flattens that into something simpler and more useful: the top of each section is the prime position, and attention decays downward. Your high-margin signatures go first in their section. The dish you're proud of but barely sell goes first or goes away.
Two things follow that most owners never do:
Order your sections the way you want the meal to go, not the way the old card was laid out. If you want people ordering starters, starters go above the burgers.
Order dishes inside each section deliberately, with drag-and-drop or Move earlier and Move later. This is free, takes ten minutes, and is the closest thing to a lever on your average check. There's more on the thinking behind it in how to organize a menu.
Worth a sanity check while you're at it: the 30/30/30/10 rule — roughly 30% food cost, 30% labor, 30% overhead, 10% profit. If a dish you're about to promote to the top of its section doesn't survive that arithmetic, promote a different one.
What a 40-dish menu actually looks like
Free gives you 40 dishes, which sounds tight until you lay it out. Here's a bistro that fits comfortably inside it, with room to spare:
STARTERS (5) — Soup of the day · Burrata, peach, basil · Beef tartare · Fried calamari · Bread & olives
SALADS (3) — House green · Caesar · Grain bowl (+ protein choice group)
PASTA (5) — Cacio e pepe · Pappardelle ragù · Vongole · Arrabbiata · Mushroom tagliatelle
MAINS (6) — Sea bass · Ribeye (+ size choice group) · Half chicken · Pork belly · Risotto · Veggie plate
SIDES (5) — Fries · Roast potatoes · Seasonal greens · House salad · Bread
DESSERT (4) — Tiramisù · Panna cotta · Chocolate tart · Affogato
SOFT DRINKS (4) · BEER (3) · WINE BY THE GLASS (5) —reds, whites and one rosé
That's 40 on the nose, and notice what did the work: choice groups, not extra dishes. The ribeye in two sizes is one dish with a "Pick one" group, not two dishes. The grain bowl with four proteins is one dish, not four. Build it the other way and the same menu needs 60 dishes and reads worse.
The wine list is where this usually breaks. A serious list can't live inside 40 dishes, and that's a real reason to move up a plan rather than a reason to cut your reds.
Sizes, sides and extras
Most menus have dishes that come in more than one form, and this is where owners either build something clean or make a mess of duplicated items.
A pizza in three sizes shouldn't be three pizzas. A burger with a choice of side shouldn't be four burgers. Intermenu handles this with Choices & extras— a group is a question the dish asks ("Size", "Pick a side", "Extras") and the options are the answers.
Groups come in two shapes. Pick one is for alternatives, where each option usually sets the price outright: Small €8, Medium €10, Large €12. Pick any number is for add-ons, where each option adds: extra cheese +€1.50.
The part worth building deliberately is that groups live in a restaurant-wide library. Build "Size" once, attach it to every pizza, and when you raise the large by fifty cents you change it in one place and every pizza follows. Each option also has its own on-menu switch, so when you run out of truffle you take that one option down without touching the six dishes that offer it.
If you're building these for the first time, how to add modifiers and options to menu items walks through it screen by screen.
One warning, because it's the only destructive corner of the product: deleted dishes and sections sit in Recently deleted for 30 days and can be restored. Choice groups and their options cannot — they're deleted permanently, and the app tells you so before you confirm.
Allergens and diets: the part that has to be right
If you take one thing from this guide, take this section.
In the EU, Regulation 1169/2011 requires you to provide allergen information on 14 specified allergens. The US mandates nine, with sesame added in 2023. That's the legal floor. The practical problem is different and sharper: a digital menu with a filter makes an implicit promise every time a dish survives the filter.
The honest design is to refuse to make that promise where you don't have the data. When a guest hides milk and nuts, dishes tagged with either disappear. But dishes nobody has tagged don't quietly pass through as if they were safe — they're moved into a separate, clearly marked "Allergen info not provided" group with a note to check with staff. Every dish row says either "Contains …" or "Allergens not specified". Silence is never presented as a promise.
Extras carry their own allergens too, so a guest can see that adding cheese adds milk. And the notice on each dish follows where you are: US restaurants get wording about the major US food allergens, everywhere else the 14 EU ones.
None of this replaces a conversation with your kitchen, and the menu says so on every dish. It makes that conversation shorter and better informed.
Deeper: allergen labeling on a digital menu.
Languages: who actually reads your menu
A tourist who can't read your menu does one of two things. They order the one dish they recognize, or they make your server recite the whole card in English. Both cost you money.
Translation runs from one button on the Languages screen — it reads something like "Translate 12 dishes into Deutsch and Français" and covers everything not yet translated or changed since it was last translated. A single run handles dish names and descriptions, section names, choice groups and their options, your restaurant description, and the names of the allergens and diets your menu uses. It runs in the background, so you keep working.
Here's the rule that matters most, and the one most platforms get wrong: a language is only offered to guests once at least half the orderable dishes have a translated name. Your main language is always available. That way nobody picks German and lands on a menu that's still mostly English — which is a worse experience than not offering German at all.
AI gets a menu most of the way. For the dish name that should stay in Italian, or the local word you prefer, there's a hand-editing grid with your wording on the left and one editable column per language. Each cell is marked "Not translated", "Changed since translating" or "Written by AI", and saving a cell marks it as checked by a person. Editing by hand costs nothing — no run, no allowance.
Right-to-left languages like Arabic lay out right to left, while prices and numbers keep their natural direction.
Deeper: a multilingual menu your tourist guests can read.
Photos, without a photographer
Photos move orders — the lift on a photographed dish is meaningful, and it's biggest on the unfamiliar items where a guest can't picture what's coming.
Two routes. Upload your own, which is always better if you have them. Or generate one from the dish editor, where the request is built from what the menu already knows about the dish — its name, description, preparation notes and diet tags — so you're not writing prompts. When a photo is AI-generated, the guest's dish sheet labels it as a representative image, which is the only honest way to do it.
Right after a photo import there's a shortcut that's worth taking: the dish list offers to generate photos for up to 25 of the newly imported dishes in one go.
Beyond dish photos there's a promo image studio for social posts, specials and events, including an event-poster mode where you fill in a short form instead of describing a picture. Both draw on the same monthly image allowance.
Deeper, with prompts you can copy:30 AI food photo prompts for restaurants.
Your QR code and the live link
Everything you need to put the menu in front of guests lives on one page: your public address, a QR code, and a print-ready sheet.
The address looks like intermenu.io/menu/your-restaurant and doesn't change when you edit the menu. That's the whole point of the thing —the code points at the menu, not at a copy of it, so a price change, a sold-out dish or a new language never means reprinting a single table tent.
Two practical notes from the print guidance that people ignore and then regret: download the vector file rather than a screenshot, and print it at least 3 cm wide, keeping the pale border around the code.
Deeper: QR code menus for restaurants.
Your menu is also a web page
This is the half of digitizing that most owners never think about, and it's free.
Your menu page isn't just for the guest at table six. It's a real web page carrying structured data that search engines read — your name, address, sections, dishes and prices. When your menu is well translated into two or more languages, each language version is announced as its own page. Filtered views and campaign links point back to the main address so your visibility isn't split across copies. Live menus go into the sitemap.
On top of that there's a public directory at intermenu.io/en/restaurants, covering 43 countries, where guests browse menus by country and city. The search there covers restaurant names, cities and the dishes on each menu— which matters more than it sounds, because people usually know they want ramen before they know where to get it.
You don't apply for the directory. A restaurant is listed automatically when its menu is published, has at least three orderable dishes in visible sections, and has its country set to one the directory covers.
Deeper: get your restaurant menu found online.
And if you've already found a page for your restaurant that you didn't create — that happens, and there's a process: someone listed my restaurant's menu, now what?
What the menu tells you back
A printed menu tells you nothing. A live one tells you how many people opened it, which dishes they tapped, which ones nobody looked at, and which languages they read in.
The numbers are kept honest: a guest who reloads within ten minutes counts once, and your own visits while signed in are excluded. You pick a window of 7, 30 or 90 days and get plain answers — times opened, busiest day, typical day, dish views — plus the five most-opened dishes and, more useful, the dishes nobody opened.
That last list is the one to act on. Before you cut a dish for not selling, check whether guests ever opened it, and where it sits in its section — things near the bottom get opened less.
Deeper: what a digital menu tells you that paper can't.
A realistic first day
If you're starting from a printed menu this morning, this is the order I'd work in:
1. Sign up and verify— name, email, password, restaurant name, main menu language. The account and the restaurant are created together.
2. Set the basics— country, currency, opening hours. Do this before anything else; currency and language touch every dish and every translation.
3. Import from photos or PDF— then work the "Needs you" tab until it's empty.
4. Clean up— fix prices, tighten descriptions, set section order. The top of each section gets the most attention, so that's where your signatures go.
5. Tag allergens and diets as you go— not "later". Later never comes.
6. Add photos to your signatures and your high-margin plates first.
7. Build your choice groups— sizes, sides, extras, once each, in the library.
8. Translate into your guests' languages, then read the top one before you rely on it.
9. Download the QR code, print it, and open the menu on your own phone like a guest would.
10. Come back weekly and make one change the data actually supports.
Steps 1 and 2 are quick. Steps 3 through 7 are where a working menu becomes a selling one. None of it needs a developer or a designer.
Watch: Get started in one sitting (1 min)
▶ Watch episode 1 on YouTube: sign up, the six-screen setup wizard, and "Your restaurant is live!". The restaurant shown, Aurora Bistro, is a demo menu. All how-to videos: How to use Intermenu (YouTube playlist).
Before you start, it's worth spending two minutes in the live demo menu— a complete example in five languages, including Arabic so you can see the right-to-left layout.
Roughly how long each step takes
Useful for deciding whether this is a morning or a project. For a single-location menu of 40 to 60 dishes:
Sign up and verify— five minutes, most of it waiting for the email.
Country, currency, hours— ten minutes, and the hours are the slow part if you have split shifts.
Photograph the card and import it— fifteen minutes of shooting, then the read runs on its own.
Work the review— thirty to sixty minutes, depending how clean the card was. This is the real work.
Section and dish order— ten minutes, and it's the highest-return ten minutes in the list.
Allergens and diets— ninety minutes for a first pass, done section by section. The one step people underestimate.
Photos— five minutes a dish if you're generating, much longer if you're shooting.
Choice groups— twenty minutes, because you're building each group once and attaching it everywhere.
Translation— the run is minutes; reading your top language properly is an hour.
QR code— five minutes to download and test.
Call it a focused morning to be live, and a second sitting for allergens and photos. Anyone who tells you it's ten minutes is describing a menu with no allergen data and no photos.
If you only have one hour
Sometimes you don't get the morning. If you have sixty minutes and you want something real in front of guests tonight, do these and nothing else:
Sign up, set country and currency. Five minutes. Getting currency wrong now costs you an hour later.
Import the food card. Not the drinks, not the specials insert — the main card.
Work only the "Needs you" tab. Ignore everything that read cleanly. You are not auditing the menu; you are removing the things that are wrong.
Fix section order, so the first thing a guest sees is what you want them to order.
Download the QR code and open the menu on your own phone.
What you deliberately skip: photos, translation, stories, and every optional field. What you must not skip is allergens if you're going to advertise the filter — but if you haven't tagged yet, the menu handles that honestly on its own, marking every untagged dish "Allergens not specified" rather than implying it's safe. That's the design that makes a one-hour launch defensible instead of reckless.
Then put ninety minutes in the diary for the allergen pass. It is the one piece of this you shouldn't carry as debt for long.
What it costs
Plans gate how much you can put in, not what the menu can do. Every plan runs the same guest experience, the same allergen and diet filters, the same AI translation and the same photo import.
Free (€0)— one location, 40 dishes, 2 menu languages, 2 AI translation runs and 2 AI images a month, 30 days of analytics. No end date — it's a working plan, not a trial. The guest menu carries a small "Powered by Intermenu" badge.
Básico (€14/month)— 150 dishes, 5 menu languages, unlimited choice groups, 25 AI images a month, badge removed.
Pro (€29/month)— unlimited dishes and languages, 100 AI images a month, per-language analytics, priority support.
Multi (€59/month)— everything in Pro across up to 3 locations, with one shared image pool and analytics across the whole organization.
Prices are as of September 2026 and exclude VAT; the pricing page always has the current ones.
The design choice worth knowing: a limit is a ceiling on what you can add, never a switch that takes something away. At 40 dishes on Free you can't add the 41st, but nothing already on your live menu is hidden or deleted. And if you import a menu with sizes on a plan without choice groups, the dishes still publish — a dish sold in sizes just shows guests a truthful price range like €8.00–€12.00 instead of a size picker.
More than one location
If you run a second café or a hotel restaurant beside a rooftop bar, you don't want a second account. On the Multi plan one organization holds up to three locations, each with its own menu, prices, languages, public link and QR code, all from one login.
Adding one takes a name, a city and a currency — and optionally a copy of an existing location's sections, dishes and choice groups with their translations, which you then adjust independently. It's the difference between opening a second site in an afternoon and rebuilding a menu from scratch.
The operational side of running several at once is covered in how to manage multiple restaurant branches.
One thing that trips people up: a single restaurant's link is intermenu.io/menu/restaurant-name, but once an organization has more than one location, menus move to intermenu.io/menu/organization-name/location-name. Codes already printed with the short address keep working — a guest scanning one is forwarded automatically, including the language they picked.
Keeping it current, which is the whole point
A printed menu is finished the day it's printed. A live one is never finished, and that's the feature — but only if someone actually maintains it. The rhythm that works:
During service: sold out in one tap, and back on the menu in one tap when the delivery lands. This is the habit that decides whether guests trust the menu. A menu that still lists the sea bass at nine o'clock teaches people to ask the server anyway, and then you've bought software to no purpose.
Weekly: open Today and clear whatever it's flagging — dishes without a price, without allergen tags, without a photo, a language missing on a handful of dishes, an empty section. It checks nine kinds of gap and puts the fix one tap away.
When prices change: the bulk percentage change moves a whole section at once, and the spreadsheet import handles a bigger repricing without touching your allergens, photos, choice groups or translations.
When the menu changes seasonally: add the new dishes, tag them as you add them, then run the translation for what's new rather than redoing everything.
Monthly: read the insights, and make one change you can measure.
Two safety nets worth knowing about before you need them. Deleted dishes and sections sit in Recently deleted for 30 days with a Restore button, so a mis-tap during a busy service is an inconvenience rather than a disaster. And restoring a section brings back the dishes that were deleted along with it — while dishes you'd deleted separately beforehand stay deleted, so nothing comes back by surprise.
Is a digital menu wrong for anyone?
Worth saying, because the honest answer isn't "no".
If your menu really does change every single day — a chalkboard place with a market menu and eight covers — the import isn't built for that rhythm, and you'll spend more time updating than the menu saves you. The same goes for a tasting-menu restaurant with one fixed sequence and no choices: there's little for a guest to browse or filter.
And a QR code should never be the only way to read your menu. Keep printed copies for the guest who wants one, the phone that died, and the table that came out to talk to each other. That's a hospitality decision, it costs almost nothing, and skipping it is where most of the backlash against QR menus came from in the first place.
Where a digital menu earns its keep is the ordinary case: a stable card, guests who don't all speak your language, allergens you're answering all evening anyway, and prices that move a few times a year.
Common mistakes when digitizing a menu
Typing the menu by hand. The single biggest waste of an evening. Import and review instead.
Setting the wrong currency or main language at the start. Fix it before you build; it touches every dish and every translation.
Leaving allergens for "later". They power the filter and your legal disclosure, and an untagged menu can't be filtered usefully by anyone.
Publishing raw machine translation unread. It's a strong draft. Skim your highest-traffic language before you trust it to a guest.
Treating the QR code as the finish line. The code is five minutes of the job. The dish data is the job.
Never opening the insights. Knowing which dishes nobody opens is the biggest thing a printed menu could never give you.
Build your menu free with Intermenu
Intermenu takes the menu you already have and makes it live: photograph it and review what we read, tag every dish for allergens and diets, generate the photos you're missing, translate it into your guests' languages, publish behind a QR code that never needs reprinting, and read what guests actually looked at.
One location, 40 dishes and two languages are free, with no card and no time limit.
Prefer to see it first? ▶ Watch "Your menu. Always right." on YouTube (1 min). The restaurant shown, Aurora Bistro, is a demo menu.
Build your digital menu free with Intermenu →
Frequently Asked Questions
How long does it take to digitize a restaurant menu?
An afternoon for most single-location menus. The import does the typing; your time goes into reviewing what was read, tagging allergens and adding photos. The QR code itself takes about five minutes at the end.
Do I have to type my whole menu in?
No. Upload up to five photos or PDF files of your printed menu and the dishes, prices and sections are drafted for you to review. Manual entry is best kept for the handful of items the import couldn't read.
Do my guests need to download an app?
No. The QR code opens the menu in the browser already on their phone. No app, no account, no sign-in.
What happens when I change a price?
It appears on the next guest's load. The QR code points at your menu rather than a copy of it, so a price change never means reprinting anything.
Which languages will my guests actually see?
Your main language always, plus any language where at least half your orderable dishes have a translated name. That threshold exists so nobody switches to German and finds a menu that's still mostly English.
Is the allergen filter a guarantee?
No, and it shouldn't claim to be. The information comes from you, it can be incomplete, and traces are possible. Untagged dishes are never shown as safe — they're held aside in a clearly marked group — and every dish asks guests with an allergy to confirm with staff.
Can I get a dish back if I delete it by mistake?
Yes. Deleted dishes and sections sit in Recently deleted for 30 days with a Restore button. The exception is choice groups and their options, which are deleted permanently — the app warns you before confirming.
Can I run more than one restaurant from one account?
Yes, on the Multi plan, up to three locations. Each has its own menu, prices, languages and QR code, and you switch between them from the Branches screen without signing out.