Digital Menu: Change Prices and Mark Items Sold Out Without Reprinting Anything

Friday, 8:40 p.m., place is packed. The red snapper’s gone. The waiter starts making the rounds table by table, breaking the news — “that one’s out” — and at three of those tables people had already made up their minds. They order something else, grudgingly, or they ask for the check. The same thing happens when the price of a kilo of avocado spikes and your printed menu — the one you had made eight months ago — still says 120 pesos.

The problem isn’t that the fish runs out. That happens in any kitchen that’s actually busy. The problem is that your menu has no way of knowing. A digital menu is your restaurant’s menu as a page you open from your phone: you change whatever needs changing, and within two minutes every one of your customers is already seeing the correct version, with nothing to print again.

Why is a printed restaurant menu so expensive?

It’s not the printing cost — it’s the price cushion you build in so you don’t have to reprint often, plus the visible patches that tell the customer something’s off. Printing 300 menus costs what it costs, and most owners have already done that math. The math almost nobody does is the other one.

When you print, you’re locking yourself into those prices for months. And since you know you’re locking yourself in, you do the logical thing: you price a little high “just in case.” You tack on an extra 20 pesos to the dish to make it through the year. Your customers pay for that cushion from day one, even if the ingredient cost doesn’t rise until November.

Then comes what we’ve all seen: the sticker slapped over the old price, the menu with correction fluid on it, the stapled page at the back that reads “new prices.” Every one of those patches tells the customer something you didn’t mean to say.

With a digital menu you change one dish on Tuesday and another on Thursday, each one exactly when it actually changed. You stop needing the cushion.

What can you change on a digital menu?

In practice, almost everything you’ll ever need to update comes down to three things: a dish’s price, what’s run out, and the special of the day.

A dish’s price. The ingredient cost went up, you adjust that one dish and that’s it. You don’t touch the other 40.

What’s run out. This is the one that gets used the most and saves the most embarrassment. Mid-service you mark the red snapper as sold out, and whoever opens the QR code at table 12 no longer sees it as available. Nobody orders something that isn’t there.

The daily or seasonal special. Thursday’s pozole, Sunday’s barbacoa, the Lent menu. On a printed menu that lives on a chalkboard half the room can’t even see. Here it lives at the top of the menu, where people actually read it.

How do you mark a dish as sold out on a digital menu?

You leave the name visible but grayed out, with a note like “not available today” — you never delete it. There’s an obvious temptation when something runs out: take it off the menu. Don’t.

If you delete the dish, the customer who walked in specifically looking for it — the one who came for the shrimp tostadas — thinks you’ve stopped serving it for good and leaves. You’ve lost a customer over something that’ll be back tomorrow.

What works instead is leaving it visible and marked: the name stays there, grayed out, with a “not available today” or “sold out today.” The message that sends is different, and it’s the right one: yes, they make it, it just sold out today, I’ll come back another day. Same information, opposite outcome.

And once you’ve got it again, you switch it back on. Two taps from your phone, at the bar, between orders.

What won’t a digital menu fix?

Four things: the printed QR code stays fixed as long as you don’t switch platforms, Google and screenshots stay out of date, you shouldn’t move prices too often, and the price a customer saw when they sat down is still the price they get charged.

The printed QR code stays the same. The code taped to the table points to a link, not to the content itself. As long as that link stays fixed and always the same, you can change the menu a thousand times without reprinting a single QR code. But if down the road you switch platforms and the link changes, you will have to reprint. Ask about that before choosing where you build it.

Google and screenshots lag behind. Someone might show up with a screenshot from three months ago, or with whatever Google happened to show them. It’ll happen now and then. It’s much rarer than with a printed menu, but it’s not zero.

Don’t change prices too often. Being able to doesn’t mean you should. If a regular customer notices the same dish costs something different every couple of weeks, they stop trusting your prices. Adjust when the cost has genuinely moved, not whenever the idea strikes you.

The golden rule of pricing. The price the customer saw when they sat down is the price they get charged. If you’re going to raise something, do it in the morning before opening or at night when you close, never in the middle of a meal. This isn’t a technical issue — it’s about not having an argument at the register.

How do you make a digital menu for your restaurant?

You describe it in your own words and it comes out published with its own link, no agency and no coding required. You can literally say something like: “a digital menu for my seafood restaurant, with categories for appetizers, tostadas, fish, and drinks, with prices, photos of the dishes, and where I can mark dishes as sold out from my phone.” That’s enough to have a first working version up and visible on screen.

From there you correct it the way you’d correct an assistant: “bump the price of the mojarra to 195,” “take out the mixed drinks,” “put the tostadas first.” Once you’re happy with how it looks, you publish it and you’ve got the link ready to put on the tables’ QR codes, on your Instagram, and on your WhatsApp.

A practical tip for day one: start with the 15 or 20 dishes that sell the most, not the 60 that appear on the old menu. A short menu that’s accurate and up to date sells more than a complete one nobody finishes reading.

Try it with the dish that runs out on you the most

If you want to find out whether this is worth it, you don’t need to change everything. Just think about the one dish that most often runs out on a Friday, and how many times a month you have to send the waiter around breaking the bad news table by table.

If that count comes out to more than two or three times a month, you already have your answer.

Describe your menu in Proyecta, see it working, and publish it once you like it. Even if you end up using it just to mark things sold out, it was already worth it.