Digital menu boards for cafés: a practical setup guide
How to run a menu board that changes from breakfast to lunch by itself, takes its prices from a Google Sheet and never needs reprinting, step by step.
Printed menus have two problems. The day you print them they start going out of date, and they say the same thing at 8 in the morning as they do at 8 at night. A screen fixes both, as long as updating it is easier than reprinting. Here's how to set one up so that it actually is.
Decide what each screen is for
Before you think about designs, think about where people look. A common setup for a café looks like this:
- Behind the counter: a wide (landscape) screen with the full menu and prices
- In the window: a tall (portrait) screen with today's offer, to bring people in
- Near the till: a smaller screen with a QR code, a loyalty offer or what's new
You don't need all three. Start with the one behind the counter; it's the one people read while they queue.
Option A: keep your prices in a Google Sheet
This is the best choice if your prices change often or you have more than one branch. The VizzBox menu board widget reads a Google Sheet and lays it out neatly on the screen. Change a price in the sheet and the screens follow within a minute. Nobody touches a design file.
- Make a sheet with five columns: section, item, description, price and badge. The badge is optional, for a short label such as "New" or "Spicy".
- In Google Sheets, choose File → Share → Publish to web, pick the sheet, choose Comma-separated values (.csv), publish it and copy the link.
- In VizzBox, add a Menu board widget to a zone on your design and paste the link. Give it a heading, choose one column or two (two works well in a tall zone), and set the currency symbol, which goes in front of any price that's just a number.
Your sheet might start like this (the prices are only examples):
| section | item | description | price | badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hot drinks | Masala chai | Brewed with ginger and cardamom | 60 | |
| Hot drinks | Filter coffee | Strong, with a little chicory | 80 | New |
| Breakfast | Poha | With peanuts and a squeeze of lemon | 90 |
Option B: upload the menu you already have
If a designer has already made your menu as a PDF, upload it as it is. Each page becomes its own slide on the screen. Pictures work the same way: JPEG, PNG, WebP, GIF or SVG.
This is the quickest way to get started. The catch is that changing a price means editing and re-exporting the file, so if you change prices every few weeks, option A will save you time.
Or start from the ready-made café design
VizzBox comes with a café menu board design that already plays. Swap in your own photos, your café's name and your items, and you have a finished board without starting from a blank screen.
Make it change with the time of day
This is what printed menus can't do. Make one design for each part of the day (say, breakfast, lunch and evening), then schedule each one on the screen with the days and times it should play. Breakfast from 7 to 11 every day, lunch from 11 to 4 on weekdays, and so on. Outside those hours the screen falls back to its everyday design.
Once it's set, nobody has to remember to switch anything over. The board changes on time, every day.
Put the menu, an offer and a ticker on one screen
You don't have to choose between the menu and your offers. Split the screen into zones: the menu on one side, a rotating offer on the other, and a line of text along the bottom ("Now hiring baristas, ask at the counter"). Each zone plays its own list at its own pace. Add the clock or the local weather if you have a corner to spare.
Small things that make a menu board work
- Big text, fewer words. If you can't read it from the back of the queue, it's too small.
- One good photo beats five small ones. Give your best seller room.
- A little movement. A slow zoom on a still photo catches the eye without being distracting.
- Use the zones for what changes. Keep the menu steady and let the offer zone do the rotating.
- Check it from your desk. The portal shows whether each screen is online and what it's playing, and on an Android player it can show you a screenshot of the screen right now.
If the café's internet drops, the screen keeps playing what it has stored and catches up when the connection returns, so a Wi-Fi hiccup won't leave you with a blank wall at the busiest time of day.
See one working
Our live demo is exactly this: the counter board of Levels Café, our made-up demo café, with its menu, offers and a ticker along the bottom, playing right now in your browser. And if you haven't set up the screen itself yet, start with how to turn any TV into a digital sign.