If you run a cafe, takeaway shop or pub, you have probably reprinted your menu more times in the last two years than in the five before it. Supplier costs move, a line comes off, a new item goes on – and every change means a design fee, a print run and a week of waiting before the board on the wall matches the till.
That is the main reason digital menu boards have taken off across Australia. It is not about looking flash. It is about being able to change what your customers see, on the day you need to change it, without paying for it every time.
The real cost of printed menus
Most small food businesses spend somewhere between $400 and $1,500 each time they redo a set of printed boards, once you count design, printing and installation. Do that twice a year and you are looking at real money over the life of a shop – and that is before you count the times you have not updated the board because it was not worth the cost, and staff have had to explain the price difference at the counter.
A digital menu board changes that maths. The screens are a fixed monthly cost, and the content is software. Putting up a price, taking off a sold-out item or swapping the whole menu takes a couple of minutes.
They also sell more
Two numbers come up again and again in the research on digital menu boards. The first is an average revenue lift of around 12% for venues that switch from printed to digital. The second is that roughly 29% of customers report making an impulse purchase because of something they saw on a screen – a coffee upsize, a side, a dessert.
The reasons are not mysterious. Screens are brighter than paper, so people actually read them. Photos of food do a better selling job than a text list. And a rotating panel promoting one thing – today's toastie, the new milkshake – gets attention in a way a static board never does.
Dayparting: the feature owners end up using most
Dayparting simply means the screen shows a different menu at different times of the day. Breakfast until 11, lunch until 2, an afternoon coffee-and-cake board, then dinner. You set it once and it runs itself.
This solves a problem every food venue has: cluttered boards. When breakfast, lunch and dinner all sit on the same wall, customers have to hunt for what they want, and the eye slides off. Show only what is available right now and ordering gets faster – which matters most at exactly the time you are busiest.
It also stops the awkward conversation where someone orders eggs benedict at 2pm because it was still on the board.
What it looks like in practice
A suburban cafe usually runs two or three 43-inch screens in portrait behind the counter – food on the left, drinks in the middle, specials on the right. A takeaway shop tends to want more panels and bigger type, because people order from further back in the queue. A pub bistro often runs one large landscape screen with a rotating specials panel, plus a small screen at the bar for drinks.
The common thread is that once the boards are in, owners use them for more than the menu. Loyalty offers, opening hours over the public holidays, a "now hiring" panel, a thank-you to a local sporting club. It becomes the shop's noticeboard.
What to look for before you sign anything
- Commercial screens, not TVs. A retail TV is built for a few hours a day. A commercial panel is rated for long daily run times and will not void a warranty for running twelve hours straight.
- Who makes the changes? Some providers charge per update. Ask the question directly and get the answer in writing.
- Content design. A digital board with a photo of a paper menu on it is a waste of a screen. The layout needs to be designed for the screen size and the viewing distance.
- Support. If a screen goes blank on a Saturday morning, you want a person to call.
How Bold Media Group does it
We design the menu boards for your shop, install the screens, and then handle unlimited content changes for three years as part of the package. New price, new item, seasonal special, a photo you took on your phone last night – you send it through and our team updates the screens. There is no per-change fee and no software for you to learn.
Most of our menu board customers are single-site cafes, takeaway shops and country pubs, so the packages are built around that: a fixed monthly cost, no big upfront spend, and someone Australian-based on the end of the phone.
If you are weighing up another print run, it is worth getting a quote on digital first. Send us a message or give us a call and we will give you an honest answer about whether it stacks up for your shop.