Digitize the menu: From photo or PDF to online menu

Why typing is unnecessary

Anyone who wants to digitize their menu usually already has everything: a printed menu, a Word file, or a PDF from the printer. Typing dishes and prices again by hand takes time and introduces new typos. A wrong price on the menu can quickly happen and is awkward if it is only noticed at the checkout.

Modern text recognition reads a menu reliably enough today to produce a first draft. The crucial point is that you thoroughly check this draft afterwards.

Take good photos of the menu

If no PDF is available, you take a photo of the menu. The better the photo, the less you have to correct later.

• Place the menu flat on a table and photograph it vertically from above.
• Use even daylight, avoid flash and reflections on laminated menus.
• Capture each page individually and ensure that no margins are cut off.
• Zoom in immediately after capturing: Are small prices and footnotes sharp?

Read and review

With Same-QR you can upload up to four photos or a PDF with up to eight pages. The AI recognizes categories, dishes, prices, and additional information and suggests a menu from them. Nothing is saved yet: you see the result in a review, correct individual lines, and only then adopt it.

Go through the review category by category and keep the original menu next to it. Typical places where text recognition goes wrong are two-column layouts, handwritten additions, and prices that are far from the dish.

What should be verified

• Prices: Does every number match, and does it belong to the correct dish? With sizes such as 0.3 l and 0.5 l, values are easily swapped.
• Allergens: Letters A to R or numbers 1 to 14 are recognized. Nevertheless, compare them with your allergen documentation – a forgotten allergen is not a minor flaw.
• Categories: Did everything end up in the right group, or is the dessert listed under drinks?
• Spelling: Proper nouns, technical terms, and dialect words are often corrected.

If allergens are listed as short codes in the additional line, the finished menu automatically displays a legend below. It appears in the language set on the guest's mobile phone – in German, English, French, Italian, or Spanish.

After that: keep up to date

Reading is a one-time step. After that, you manage the menu directly: change the price, remove a dish, enter the daily special. No longer send the old file to the printer, but print paper menus from the current version in the future. Otherwise, after a few months, you will have two menus with different prices.

If you have a large menu, it is worth cleaning it up once after scanning. Dishes that are rarely ordered and duplicate variants make the menu longer on the phone without helping guests.

Typical pitfalls in digitization

• Handwritten additions on the old menu that are not in any file – they are easily lost when reading in.
• Prices that were covered on the printed menu: The photo then shows the sticker, the PDF the old price.
• Dishes that are no longer offered but still appear in the print file.
• Footnotes like "side dishes can be exchanged for an additional charge," which suddenly disappear on the mobile phone.

The safest approach is to review the scanned menu together with the kitchen once before publishing it. You correct anything that stands out immediately. After that, the digital menu becomes the primary source, and printed menus are created from it – not the other way around.

Frequently asked questions