The Digital Menu Revolution
During the COVID-19 pandemic, a lot changed in the bar and restaurant industry. Establishments were closed to the public, delivery went from pizza and Chinese to every single restaurant, and when restaurants re-opened new restrictions forced them to adapt and change.
One of the biggest changes was how menus are presented to guests. Handheld, printed menus were seen as a way to transmit disease and were out. In their place many bars and restaurants adopted digital menus that they would direct guests to via QR codes located on the tables or carry-out window.
Now that those type of restrictions are long-gone, many establishments have gone back to printed menus, but a growing number have stayed digital, or are converting back to digital.
A digital menu does little if it is just a QR code that links to a PDF of what would otherwise be a printed menu. In fact, I think it has the ability to turn off guests. With print menus returning to the norm, not printing them just makes you seem a bit cheep.
Digital menus offer entirely different possibilities though. When a digital menu is way more than a printed menu you can create a new guest experience the brings you into the 21st century.
Think about it, menus haven’t changed in hundred of years. There has been zero innovation in the front of house experience. Guests at a restaurant in 1923, had the same basic experience as guests have today in 2023.
Digital menus give us that opportunity to change. To adapt what a bar or restaurant is to the world around us. To embrace technology and the future of crafting an outstanding guest experience.
By allowing customers to order when they want at their table without the need of a server to take the order and enter it, it is possible to greatly shorten the time from when a guests first thinks that they want something and having it delivered to the table. This can actually work to increase sales, since there is less time to think, and guests are more likely to make impulse buys.
By freeing up servers, we are able to re-deploy them in the front of house. This means that rather than spending times punching in orders, they can spend more time interacting with our guests, pushing upcoming events, answering guest questions about the food, making personal recommendations, and amplifying the overall guest experience.
In the last few years, reinventing how tipping works has been a huge push in the industry. One of the largest barriers to this is the normal restaurant organizational structure. If you have guest ambassadors in the front that do not need to take and enter orders, that should decrease the number of front of house staff needed. Further, since no one individual is only responsible for a table, we have much greater teamwork required to deliver the guest experience. This means that tips do not have to work as they always have.
For example, the front of house staff could actually be started at the same hourly rates as back of house. Meaning that we could eliminate the hourly pay disparity between the two groups. Then, since there isn’t really a single traditional server for each guest, tips (or even a service charge added to each tab) could be split among everyone working in the establishment. Pay wouldn’t be random, it would reflect the experience of each team member and everyone would have an equal share of the tips.
Taking this a step further, by doing things this way, it actually makes it easier to provide, and build in the cost of, great employee benefits. It should be able to allow most restaurants and bars to be able to offer paid sick time and vacation, and maybe even retirement benefits like a 401K.
Digital menus offer us the opportunity to push more change in the bar and restaurant business than we have had in literal centuries. It is what will seperate the restaurants that move into the 21st century from those that will be stuck in the past. Unless we as an industry start to adapt and move with the times, we will find it harder to make money and control our future.
It is early still, but embracing the future will be the path to future prosperity.