Turn a paper menu into a digital one without retyping it

The obstacle is not the technology, it is the retyping

Anyone running a venue understands a digital menu in two minutes. What stops most people is the next thought: somebody has to take the printed card and retype it, section by section, dish by dish, description by description, price by price. For a forty-item menu that is an afternoon of work, and it is usually the afternoon nobody has.

That is why so many digital menus are left half done: opened, never filled in.

Photograph the menu instead of retyping it

The fastest way to put an existing card online is to start from the card itself. With FlyMenu you photograph the printed menu, one page at a time, or upload the PDF you already sent to the printer. In about ten seconds per page you get a draft with sections, dishes, descriptions and prices, including double prices such as half and full portions, and the cover charge.

Nothing goes live without your say-so. The draft appears next to your photos, so you can compare line by line, adjust whatever you want, and create the menu when you are ready. Until that moment it stays hidden from guests.

How accurate the reading is

The tests were run on real menus, not on examples built for the purpose:

• printed menus and PDFs: transcribed correctly;
• handwritten menus: 38 dishes correct out of 43, roughly nine out of ten.

Even on a handwritten card — in the handwriting of whoever filled it in, perhaps with one line crossed out and rewritten — the draft comes back almost complete. The few lines to adjust are shown next to the photo, and the menu becomes public only when you decide it does.

Numbers like these are not something you usually see published: the habit is to promise a flawless transcription of any menu. We would rather tell you in advance what to expect, so you know how long the final check really takes.

Allergens are your declaration, because you know the recipe

Allergens already printed on the card are copied — the numbers with a legend, the symbols, the wording — and nothing else: nothing inferred from the ingredients, nothing guessed from the name of a dish.

That is how it should be. Regulation (EU) 1169/2011 places responsibility for allergen information on the business serving the food: on anything that was not written on the card, the last word is yours, because you know what is in the dish.

What about languages?

If your card is already printed in two languages — common in tourist areas — the two versions are separated: the main language stays as the text of the dish, the other becomes its translation. Automatic translation into other languages is a separate feature, which you switch on from the menu when you want it.

In practice

Photograph the pages with your phone, upload them, wait a few seconds, read the draft next to the photos, fix two or three lines and publish. A menu that used to take an afternoon of retyping is done in ten minutes of checking.

The feature is included in the Premium plan, along with automatic translation, allergens and the venue's mini-site. You can upload up to twelve pages at a time, which covers almost any card, and each venue has ten readings a month: enough for the main menu, the wine list and seasonal changes.

Before you start

Three details that make a real difference to the result:

1. One photo per page, straight and in focus, with the whole page in frame.
2. Even lighting: photos taken against a window, or with the shadow of your hand across the page, are the ones that produce most errors.
3. If you have the PDF from the printer, use it instead of photos: it is the better route, because the text is read directly.

And then read the draft: ten minutes, and it is the last word on your menu — the one that should stay with you.