Your menu is a living thing: prices move, dishes sell out, seasons change. Scanqur gives you a product and category manager built for phones, so keeping your digital menu accurate takes seconds, not a call to a designer.
Le Petit Marché
5 categories · 47 products
Most menu tools treat your menu as a document you publish once. Reality is messier: the fish supplier changes prices weekly, the special runs out at 8pm, and the summer card needs to appear in June. If updating your menu is slow or requires a computer, it simply stops being updated, and guests end up ordering things you no longer serve at prices you no longer charge.
Scanqur models your menu as a structured catalog: categories that group your offering, and products with prices, photos, descriptions and availability. Because it is data rather than a design file, every change, a new dish, a hidden item, a reordered category, is a couple of taps, applied live.
Categories are the sections of your menu, Starters, Mains, Drinks, or Cakes, Breads, Sandwiches for a bakery. On a phone screen, guests navigate by tapping category tabs, so your category structure is your menu’s table of contents. Scanqur lets you create, rename, reorder and hide categories freely.
Each product holds a name, price, description, photo and availability status. Well-maintained product data pays off everywhere at once:
When editing means opening a laptop, finding the design file or emailing someone, small updates queue up until the menu is visibly wrong.
Nothing sours a table faster than choosing a dish that isn’t available. Paper can’t hide the 86’d items; a digital menu should.
Dishes get added over the years and never removed. An 80-item menu is slower to browse, slower to cook from, and hides your bestsellers.
A dish description written in 2022, in one language, sells nothing to this year’s tourists. Structured products make copy and translations maintainable.
Change a price from behind the counter and it is on every guest’s phone before you put yours down. No publishing step, no cache delays.
Reorder categories and products by dragging. Put bestsellers and high-margin dishes where eyes land first.
Mark a dish sold out and it vanishes from the guest menu until you bring it back. Perfect for daily specials and limited batches.
Starting from paper? The AI menu scanner imports your whole catalog from photos, so management starts from a full menu, not an empty one.
Names and descriptions can be maintained per language, so your catalog serves locals and tourists from the same QR code.
Because your menu is structured data, Scanqur can show views per product and category, the evidence for your next menu change.
Aim for 4–8 categories that match how guests think: courses for a restaurant, product families for a shop. In Scanqur, add them under Categories and drag them into the order guests should encounter them.
Tip: Put the category you most want to sell, not necessarily the first course, near the top. Phone menus are read top-down.
For each product, enter the name, price and a one-line description naming the main ingredients. Do photos for bestsellers first; a menu with ten great photos beats one with sixty mediocre ones.
Drag your most profitable and most popular items to the top two or three slots of each category, the positions phone screens show first.
Hide seasonal dishes and sold-out items rather than deleting them. They keep their photos, descriptions and history for when they return.
A 60-second daily check, prices right, 86’d items hidden, special added, keeps the menu permanently trustworthy. It is the cheapest quality signal your business can send.
Keep descriptions to one appetising line
"Slow-roasted pork, apple slaw, brioche bun" tells a guest everything. Ingredients over adjectives, always.
Photograph in daylight, from above or 45°
Natural light near a window beats any filter. Consistent angles make the whole menu look professionally shot.
Review the bottom of your menu quarterly
Items that never get viewed or ordered are costing attention. Cut them or reinvent them, analytics will tell you which are which.
Use hiding instead of deleting
Seasonal and rotating dishes should be toggled, not rebuilt from scratch every year.
Don’t create a category per dish
Fifteen categories with three items each makes navigation exhausting. Merge until each category earns its tab.
Don’t stuff prices into descriptions
Prices belong in the price field, that is what keeps them consistent, searchable and easy to update in one place.
Don’t upload dark, cropped or stock photos
A bad photo sells worse than no photo. And guests recognise stock images instantly, it reads as dishonest.
Don’t let the menu sprawl
Every added dish dilutes the rest. The strongest menus are curated, not accumulated.
Nadia’s bistro carried 74 items, every dish added since opening, none ever removed. Guests took ages to order, the kitchen kept rarely-used ingredients in stock, and her printed menu had become a booklet.
After importing everything into Scanqur, she saw her menu as a list for the first time in years. She hid 21 items on the spot, dishes she privately knew nobody ordered, and reordered each category to lead with the dishes she is known for.
A month of analytics confirmed the rest: two more dishes never got a single view, while her lamb tagine was the most-viewed item in the entire menu. She cut the two, gave the tagine a proper photo and the top slot, and now updates the daily special from her phone during morning prep.
Ordering got faster, food waste dropped with the shorter ingredient list, and the menu finally reads like the restaurant she actually runs.
74 → 51
items after the first pruning
60 sec
daily menu upkeep from her phone
#1
her signature dish, now impossible to miss
Once your products are structured, these features multiply their value.
Replace your paper menu with a digital one: add your dishes, pick a theme, print the code. The complete guide, free.
Read articleScanqur’s AI scanner extracts your categories, dishes and prices from a photo, so you skip an afternoon of retyping.
Read articleViews, unique visitors, top products and top categories, so menu decisions run on evidence instead of hunches.
Read articleImport your catalog, structure your categories, and never serve an outdated menu again. Scanqur is free to start.
Merchants manage tens of thousands of products with Scanqur every day.