Menu QR codes for restaurants and cafés
Your logo in the middle, your colours around it, £1 once. Not £12 a month for a menu platform you didn't want in the first place.
This small business supports a young family in the Scottish Highlands working in nature conservation.
A real example: a table card
The Bothy Coffee House
Today’s menu
Scan to see the menu
bothycoffee.co.uk/menu
A table card with the café’s own brown and its cup mark in the centre. No third-party logo, no "powered by" strip along the bottom.
It is a real code, generated by the same code path that fulfils a paid order and checked to decode before it was published. Point a phone at it and it opens this page.
- Point it at your own menu page and you can change the menu daily without touching the printed cards.
- No monthly menu subscription, and nothing that stops working mid-service.
- One per table from a pack of 25, laminated once and done.
Try it — this code really scans
You probably don't need a menu platform
The going rate for "QR menus" is £10–£30 a month. What you get for that is a hosted menu page, a code that points at it, and a bill that continues for as long as the restaurant exists.
If you already have a website with your menu on it — or a PDF you update anyway — you don't need any of that. You need a code that points at your own page. That's £1, once.
The subscription version also means your code stops working the month you stop paying, which tends to be discovered by a table of customers staring at a laminate that no longer does anything. Why that happens.
Changing your menu without changing your codes
This is the bit worth getting right. Point your code at a fixed address on
your own site — yourcafe.co.uk/menu — and change what lives
at that address whenever you like.
New specials board on Monday, seasonal menu in June, price changes in January: the code never changes, because the address never changes. Your table talkers stay exactly as they are.
What you must not do is point the code at a file whose name
changes — menu-spring-2026.pdf — because then every menu
update breaks every code. Use one stable address and update what's behind
it.
One code per table, done in one go
If you want to know which tables actually scan, or you're running table ordering, generate them as a batch with a label each:
Table 1 | https://yourcafe.co.uk/menu?t=1
Table 2 | https://yourcafe.co.uk/menu?t=2
Terrace 1 | https://yourcafe.co.uk/menu?t=terrace1
Bar | https://yourcafe.co.uk/menu?t=bar
You get table-1.png, table-1.svg and so on, plus
a PDF contact sheet listing every code against its table — handy when
you're sticking them down and want to be sure table 7 got table 7's code.
25 codes for £15, 50 for £25. Order a pack.
Printing them so they actually scan
- At least 2cm across on a table talker; 3cm is more forgiving in low light.
- Matt, not gloss. Gloss lamination and candlelight are a bad combination — the reflection blinds the camera.
- Keep the contrast strong. Dark code, light background. A pale code on a dark table talker is the most common reason a menu code fails.
- Leave a clear margin around the code, roughly four squares' width, and don't print it over a photograph.
- Say what it is. "Scan for menu" underneath, in words, for anyone who'd rather ask for a paper one.
- Keep some paper menus. Not everyone has a phone with them, or data, or the eyesight for a phone screen at dinner.
Use the SVG for anything printed — it stays crisp at any size. The PNG is for screens and quick in-house printing.