In today’s fast-paced restaurant industry, staying ahead means embracing modern solutions – yet many establishments still rely on outdated paper menus or static chalkboards.
These traditional methods come with several drawbacks: reprinting costs add up every time there’s a small change in pricing or menu items, and physical menus take up valuable space, especially when displaying an extensive menu. Even static chalkboard menu can quickly become cluttered and hard to read after some changes.
This is where digital menu boards come in as a game-changer. With a single TV screen, restaurants can showcase their entire menu in an eye-catching slideshow, complete with high-quality images and dynamic content.
This not only enhances the customer experience but also streamlines operations and reduces costs in the long run. Let’s explore why upgrading to TV screen menu is a smart move for any restaurant.
Switching to digital display menu isn’t just about aesthetics – it’s a proven way to boost your restaurant’s revenue.
Studies show that well-designed digital menus can enhance customer engagement, leading to increased sales. In fact, 91% of our customers report that upgrading to digital menu boards has helped them increase sales by up to 10%
Digital TV screen menu attract more attention, promote high-margin items more effectively, and make it easier to update promotions in real-time, encouraging customers to spend more.
Why Your Restaurant Needs Digital Menu Boards Today?
| Feature / Benefit | Quick Advantage for Restaurants |
|---|---|
| Feature / Benefit: Customers Can Visualize Your Menu | Quick Advantage: Engaging food visuals help customers make faster, more confident ordering decisions. |
| Feature / Benefit: Save Time in Updating Menus | Quick Advantage: Easily update all screens across multiple locations in just a few clicks—no manual work needed. |
| Feature / Benefit: Cost Saving | Quick Advantage: Eliminate ongoing printing and design costs with digital, editable menus. |
| Feature / Benefit: Attention-Grabbing Menus | Quick Advantage: Dynamic layouts and visuals capture attention and influence what customers choose. |
| Feature / Benefit: Dayparting: Accurate Menus All the Time | Quick Advantage: Schedule menus by time or day to automatically show the right items at the right time. |
| Feature / Benefit: Enhancing Operational Efficiency | Quick Advantage: Reduce repetitive customer questions by displaying key food info like ingredients or allergens. |
| Feature / Benefit: Boost Sales by 21–23% | Quick Advantage: Highlight best-sellers, upsells, and offers to increase average order value and total revenue. |
| Feature / Benefit: Promote New Items Instantly | Quick Advantage: Launch and highlight new items or deals across all branches with no delay or printing. |
| Feature / Benefit: Convenient and Easy to Use | Quick Advantage: Use drag-and-drop editing to make quick changes without needing a designer. |
| Feature / Benefit: Higher Profit Margins | Quick Advantage: Save long-term costs and boost sales to generate greater overall profitability. |
| Feature / Benefit: Upselling Opportunities | Quick Advantage: Visually promote add-ons, sides, and combos to encourage more spending per order. |
| Feature / Benefit: Brand Consistency | Quick Advantage: Keep fonts, colors, layouts, and images uniform across all locations for a strong brand identity. |
| Feature / Benefit: Reduce Wait Time | Quick Advantage: Speed up ordering by helping customers decide quickly through clear, visual menus. |
| Feature / Benefit: Meet Health Regulations Easily | Quick Advantage: Display calorie counts and nutrition facts clearly to stay compliant with food laws. |
| Feature / Benefit: Go Digital, Go with the Trend | Quick Advantage: Modern digital displays enhance your interior and align with industry-leading QSR trends. |
From eye-catching visuals to real-time updates, they offer numerous benefits that drive engagement and profitability. Below, we’ll explore 15 key advantages of digital menu boards and why they are a must-have for your restaurant.
1. Customers can visualise your menu
A picture is worth a thousand words, and in the restaurant industry, high-quality images and dynamic animations can significantly influence customer decisions. Unlike static paper menus, digital display menu allow you to showcase mouthwatering food visuals that immediately capture attention.
Even a slight change in an image or animation can make a dish stand out, enticing customers to order more.
Moreover, customers don’t always want to read long descriptions. Instead, seeing a well-presented dish or a short video of it being prepared creates an instant craving, leading to quicker decisions and increased sales.
Digital menu boards transform your menu into a visually engaging experience, making it easier for customers to choose – and more likely to return for more!
2. Save Time in Updating Menus
Imagine managing 10 restaurant locations, each with three TV screens displaying your menu. Without digital signage software like DotSignage, updating all 30 screens would mean sending a person to each location, manually uploading the new menu via a USB drive, and even climbing a ladder for every screen a time-consuming and inefficient process.
With digital menu boards powered by DotSignage, you can instantly update all locations from a single place, ensuring menu changes, promotions, and pricing updates are applied seamlessly.
Plus, our easy-to-use template editor makes small changes like updating prices or menu items effortless and instant. Once your menu is created in our editor, you can modify it in just a few clicks, without needing a designer’s help.
No more back-and-forth revisions, waiting for updated images, or manually uploading new menus just quick, seamless updates that appear on your screens instantly, saving you time and effort.
3. Cost Saving
While the initial investment in digital menu boards may seem high, they offer significant cost savings in the long run.
Many restaurants update their menus monthly, whether it’s adjusting prices or adding new items. Every small change means reprinting paper menus, incurring printing and design costs repeatedly.
With restaurant digital signage, these costs are completely eliminated, allowing you to update menus instantly without additional expenses.
Beyond printing costs, digital menu boards also save staff time. Instead of manually replacing paper menus, your employees can focus on customer engagement and order-taking, improving efficiency and service quality.
Plus, you reduce paper waste and no longer have to worry about menus getting damaged by spills your digital displays remain clean, professional, and easy to update, making them a smart, long-term investment.
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4. Attention-Grabbing Menus That Drive Decisions
A recent study shows that the average customer spends just 109 seconds scanning a menu before making a decision.
In that short time, a static paper menu with uniform fonts and minimal visuals can confuse customers, often leading them to pick the first item they read, or worse, base decisions purely on price.
With digital menu boards, you can capture attention instantly.
Using eye-catching visuals, animations, and strategic placements of high-margin items or daily specials, you can guide customer choices more effectively.
Placing these key items at the top or bottom of your digital display increases their visibility and boosts the likelihood of them being ordered.
TV screen menus don’t just display food, they create a dynamic and engaging experience that draws the customer in, making it easier for them to choose what they want and more likely to select the items you want to sell most.
5. Dayparting - Accurate Menus All the Time
Many restaurants offer different menus for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, which can be tricky to manage with traditional paper menus. But with digital menu boards and DotSignage, keeping your menus accurate at all times becomes effortless.
Using our regular event scheduler feature, you can easily set specific menus to play at set times during the day. For example, if your restaurant has the same breakfast, lunch, and dinner menu every day, you just need to set it up once, then copy the schedule for the entire week-saving time and avoiding manual changes.
Planning for special occasions like Christmas, Easter, or even happy hours? With our event-based scheduler, you can display a custom menu for just that one day or event, and the system will automatically revert to your regular menu afterward.
Thanks to this smart scheduling, your customers will always see the right menu at the right time, whether it’s morning coffee or dinner specials. And even when your store is closed, displaying scheduled menus on a window-facing screen can catch the eye of passersby at night, increasing engagement and driving foot traffic when you’re open again.
6. Enhancing Operational Efficiency
Restaurant staff often spend a lot of time answering the same customer questions, “Is this dish spicy?”, “Can I add cheese?”, “Is it gluten-free?”, “How many calories does this have?”, “Is there any ongoing offer?” and more.
These repetitive queries not only slow down the service but also take staff attention away from order-taking and customer engagement. With digital menu boards, all these common details can be clearly displayed on the screen, including ingredients, spice levels, customization options, allergens, calorie counts, and any ongoing deals or combos.
When customers get the information they need up front, they feel more confident in making quick decisions without relying on staff support.
This leads to faster service, fewer interruptions, and a smoother operational flow, allowing your team to focus on what matters most, delivering great food and exceptional customer experiences.
7. Boost Sale up to 21-23%
Digital menu boards have been proven to increase restaurant sales by up to 23%, and here’s how:
Visual Impact Drives Choices: High-quality images and motion graphics capture attention and make food look more appealing. This visual appeal encourages impulse purchases, especially of high-margin items and add-ons like drinks, sides, or desserts.
Strategic Item Placement: With digital displays, you can easily highlight best-sellers, combos, or limited-time offers in prime screen positions. This guides customer decisions and increases the chances they’ll pick what you want to sell most.
Real-Time Promotions: Digital boards let you instantly push offers, upsell opportunities, or time-sensitive discounts (e.g. happy hours or lunch specials), encouraging customers to buy more or try something new.
All of this combined creates a more engaging, persuasive, and flexible menu experience that directly contributes to higher ticket sizes and more frequent orders, resulting in a significant boost in overall sales.
8. Promote New Items
Launching a new menu item shouldn’t be a hassle, but with traditional menus, it often is. Restaurants usually need to reprint all their paper menus, which not only takes time and money but also becomes even more complicated when managing multiple branches.
With digital menu boards, introducing a new item becomes instant and effortless. Whether you have one outlet or a chain of 50, you can launch new items across all locations at the same time with just a few clicks using DotSignage.
Want to make the launch even more effective? You can highlight the new item on half the screen, add eye-catching visuals or animations, and even run limited-time offers to create urgency and excitement. This ensures your new product gets the attention it deserves, driving faster adoption and boosting initial sales without the typical delays and costs of traditional menu updates.
9. Convenient and Easy to Use
One of the biggest advantages of digital menu screen is how simple and user-friendly they are – especially with DotSignage. We offer 750+ professionally designed digital menu board templates that can be easily customized using our drag-and-drop editor. No need to wait for a designer or go back and forth on small edits.
With traditional menus, even a minor price change or image update means involving a designer, creating a new layout, printing new menus, and distributing them across all branches. But with DotSignage, restaurant managers can update pricing, swap images, or tweak menu items themselves in just a few clicks, no technical skills required.
This level of convenience not only saves time and cost but also gives you complete control and flexibility, making your restaurant operations more agile and efficient.
10. Higher Profit Margins
While investing in TV screens and digital signage software may seem costly upfront, the long-term return is significant. Based on our client data, most restaurants make monthly updates to their menus, whether it’s changing a price, promoting an offer, or swapping an image. That’s 12 updates per year, which would normally require reprinting menus every single time.
Now imagine doing that over 10 years, especially if you’re a multi-location restaurant chain. The design, printing, and distribution costs add up quickly, and often become a barrier to making necessary pricing or menu changes. Some restaurant managers even hesitate to adjust prices because of the cost and hassle of reprinting.
With digital menu boards, those limitations disappear. You can update pricing, promotions, or visuals instantly and affordably, allowing you to adapt quickly to market changes and boost sales. Plus, engaging food visuals, promotional videos, calorie info, and upselling tactics on screen help increase order value – contributing to a potential 23% sales boost.
When you combine increased revenue with the elimination of printing and design costs, digital menu boards deliver consistently higher profit margins over time, making them a smart and sustainable investment for any restaurant.
11. Upselling Opportunities
Digital menu boards open up powerful upselling opportunities that are difficult to achieve with static menus. You can easily promote high-margin add-ons like extra cheese, premium toppings, or special sauces by visually displaying how delicious the item looks with those extras. Placing mouthwatering images or short clips of upgraded versions of your dishes on the side of the screen helps entice customers to spend a little more.
You can also promote sides and combo meals by showcasing them right next to main items. For example, instead of showing just a burger, you can highlight it alongside fries and a drink as a combo offer, priced just slightly higher than the standalone item. This subtle nudge encourages customers to go for the better-value option—increasing your average ticket size and boosting profit margins without any extra effort from your staff.
12. Brand Consistency
When your restaurant operates across multiple locations, locally, statewide, or even nationally, maintaining a consistent brand identity becomes essential. Customers recognize and trust your brand through consistent use of colors, fonts, menu layouts, and visuals.
With digital menu boards, you can easily ensure that every branch displays the same brand elements – from the font style and size used in your menu categories and prices to the color scheme, shapes, and design layout that define your brand’s visual identity.
Even decorative food styling and imagery can be kept uniform, helping customers instantly identify and connect with your restaurant, no matter which location they visit.
This brand consistency not only enhances recognition but also builds trust, making your restaurant feel more professional, reliable, and polished – an essential part of scaling your business successfully.
13. Reduce Wait Time
One of the key advantages of digital menu boards is their ability to speed up customer decision-making. When customers can visually see the food items – with clear images, categories, and prices displayed on screen, they can decide what to order much faster compared to reading through a static paper menu.
This leads to a faster turnaround time at the counter, especially during peak hours, helping your staff serve more customers in less time. By reducing hesitation and confusion during the ordering process, digital menu boards minimize wait times, improve the flow of service, and enhance the overall customer experience.
14. Meet Health Regulations with Ease
In the U.S., food chains are legally required to display calorie counts for every item on their menu. Fulfilling this requirement with printed menus can be challenging, especially when frequent updates are needed or space is limited.
With digital menu boards, it’s easy to display accurate calorie information clearly and legibly alongside each item. Whether you need to show exact calorie numbers, highlight low-calorie options, or update nutritional details regularly, digital menus make it simple and compliant.
This not only helps you meet health regulations effortlessly but also builds transparency and trust with health-conscious customers who appreciate having that information
15. Go Digital, Go with the Trend
Today’s leading QSRs (Quick Service Restaurants) and modern food chains are embracing digital menu boards, not just for functionality, but also for the visual appeal and trendy customer experience they deliver.
Large TV screens displaying dynamic menus don’t just inform; they also elevate your restaurant’s interior, adding a modern, polished look that attracts more customers. Going digital helps you stay ahead of the curve, align with industry trends, and meet evolving customer expectations.
From reducing wait times and upselling effectively, to enhancing visual engagement and increasing sales, digital menu boards give your restaurant a competitive edge. Don’t get left behind – go digital and unlock a smarter, more stylish way to serve your customers.
Case Study
Shaka Restaurant – Pittsburgh’s top Hawaiian Restaurant
Shaka is Pittsburgh’s top Hawaiian restaurant, famous for mixing traditional Hawaiian recipes with modern twists. Skilled chefs create their dishes using fresh, local ingredients, bringing the flavors of the Hawaiian islands to life.
Shaka’s menu is extensive and detailed, with many dishes needing clear descriptions.
They needed a menu board solution to present each item and allow easy updates on multiple screens. DotSignage lets them manage their menu updates effortlessly across remote screens.
American Releaf
American Releaf Green Therapy Cannabis Dispensary offers top-quality therapeutic cannabis products. They focus on holistic wellness through natural remedies, providing customers with a wide range of products designed to enhance well-being and promote health.
With DotSignage, they found the perfect digital menu board solution. The easy-to-use editor allows them to create custom menu boards that effectively showcase their brand and products. This solution enables them to update their menus quickly, ensuring that customers always have the latest information about their offerings.
DotSignage helps American Releaf maintain a professional and appealing display, enhancing the overall customer experience.
Bagel Market in New York, USA
For more than 15 years now, Bagel Market has been delighting millions of its customers with mouth-watering breakfast and lunch at the Grand Central Area of NYC. They have started DotSignage to display their wonderful bagel menu on TV screens at their New York outlet.
Find our product interesting? You can always reach us on info@dotsignage.com for more details or you can try our 7-day free trial
FAQs
Yes, highly effective for restaurants.
As per our current customer feedback, restaurants using our digital menu boards have seen an average 3% increase in ticket size and up to 10% growth in overall sales.
Digital menu boards are effective because they grab attention quickly, help customers make faster, enable upselling and cross-selling, allow real-time updates and scheduled content for different meal.
- Digital menus offer several strong advantages over printed menus, especially when it comes to cost, convenience, and presentation.
Save on printing costs: Every time you update prices, launch a new item, or run a promotion, there’s no need to reprint menus. This alone can save up to 60% of your total cost compared to ongoing print expenses.
More attractive and modern: Digital menu boards look far more professional, engaging, and visually appealing than static paper menus.
Easy updates in real time: Whether it’s for a special offer, price change, or seasonal event like Christmas or Valentine’s Day, updates can be done instantly from one dashboard.
No need to print for every small change: You avoid repeated printing for promotions, new items, or temporary menus, saving both time and money.
In short, digital menus are cost-efficient, flexible, and visually impactful, making them a smart upgrade over traditional printed menus.
Yes, digital menu boards can boost your sales by up to 10%.
This growth comes from a combination of key benefits:
- 3% increase in average ticket size through effective upselling and promotional item highlights.
- No recurring printing costs, saving money that directly improves your profit margins.
- Faster order decisions reduce queue time, allowing more orders to be processed each day.
- Eye-catching window displays grab attention from people passing by, encouraging foot traffic and impulse visits.
By combining visual appeal, speed, and smarter promotions, digital menu boards not only improve the customer experience but also drive real, measurable sales growth.
The cost is just $10/month per screen for our digital signage software.
In addition, you’ll need an Android TV—the size of which depends on your restaurant’s layout and viewing distance:
- For a viewing distance of around 8 feet, a 40-inch TV is ideal.
- For 18 feet or more, you should consider a 60-inch or larger display.
- TV prices vary based on brand and screen size, so the hardware cost can range accordingly. But overall, it’s a low monthly investment with a high return in sales, engagement, and efficiency.
The best digital menu boards for small restaurants is one that is affordable, easy to use, and flexible.
Look for a digital signage solution that starts at just $10/month, offers built-in menu templates, and includes a drag-and-drop editor, so you don’t need to hire a designer for every small change.
Also, make sure the software is compatible with any Android TV, allowing you to set it up easily without investing in expensive hardware. This combination makes it perfect for small restaurants looking for professional results on a budget.
While many digital signage providers focus on corporate-level solutions, DotSignage stands out as a restaurant-first platform built specifically to meet the needs of food businesses.
We offer:
Over 750+ ready-to-use digital menu board templates tailored for restaurants
An easy drag-and-drop editor that even non-technical users can customize effortlessly
Additional tools like Tablet Digital Menus, Order Status Displays, and QR Code Ordering Apps, all working seamlessly with DotSignage
Unlike generic solutions built for multiple industries, DotSignage is designed with deep understanding of restaurant operations, making it the leading choice for restaurants of all sizes.
About Smit
Smit Nebhwani, a tech entrepreneur with over a decade of experience, specializes in building successful SaaS products. An authority in digital signage, he shares valuable industry insights through his content. In his free time, he enjoys music, traveling, and family time.
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