How to Create a QR Code Menu
You can generate a QR code in about ten seconds. That is not the part anyone struggles with.
The struggle is what sits behind it. Most restaurants point their code at a PDF, discover six months later that guests still flag down a waiter to order, and conclude QR menus do not work.
This is a step-by-step guide to how to create a QR code menu that people actually use. The build, the options, the code itself, and the mistakes that kill the whole thing quietly.
What You Need Before You Start
Gather these first and the build takes an afternoon instead of a week.
- Your item list, ideally in a spreadsheet with names, descriptions and prices
- Photos of your dishes, or at least of the ones that sell
- Your logo and your brand colour
- The WhatsApp number that should receive orders
- A note of which dishes have sizes, required choices or paid extras
That last one is the item most people skip and then rebuild everything around later. Spend ten minutes on it now.
Step One: Build Your Items Once
Start with the catalogue, not the code.
If your menu is already in Excel or a CSV, upload the file rather than typing it again. Names, descriptions and prices come across together, and you organise them into categories afterwards.
Give each dish a real page. Photos, and video where you have it. The first image becomes the cover, so lead with the one that sells.
Build each item once. If you run more than one branch, the same dish will be reused across all of them rather than retyped, which is the difference between a menu you maintain and menus that drift apart.
Step Two: Add the Options Your Menu Actually Has
This is the step that separates a working QR menu from a picture of one.
- Small, medium, large, each carrying its own price.
- Required choices. “Pick a sauce.” “Which bread.” The dish cannot be added until the guest chooses.
- Optional paid extras. Add cheese, add avocado, each priced individually.
- Recommended pairs. Suggest a side or a drink on the item page.
Build your option groups once and reuse them. Once “choice of bread” exists, it attaches to every sandwich rather than being rebuilt on each one.
A warning from live menus. A lot of restaurants encode bread type or colour as four separate items instead of one item with a choice. It works, and it turns a twenty-dish menu into a seventy-row list that nobody wants to scroll. Use the option builder.
Step Three: Add Allergens, Calories and Details
These live on the item, not in a footnote.
Calories, allergens and an SKU if you use one. When a guest asks what is in something, the answer is already on their phone, in whichever language they are reading.
It also means that when rules or recipes change, you edit one field rather than reprinting a card.
Step Four: Brand It
A menu should look like it belongs to you, not to whichever tool made it.
- Upload your logo
- Set your brand colour
- Choose a cover image, or a plain colour if that suits you better
- Pick which languages this location offers
The languages step gets skipped more than it should. English plus fourteen others is available, and the guest switches on the page itself, so one code serves a table where nobody shares a first language.
Step Five: Create the Outlet and Its Menu
An outlet is a location. A menu is a selection of items attached to it.
Create the outlet, then choose which items appear on its menu. A branch that does not do breakfast simply does not carry the breakfast items.
Set the outlet’s own opening hours, including split shifts, its delivery zones and fees if you deliver, its tax setup and its payment methods. Then add the WhatsApp number for that location, so orders arrive where they are cooked.
Step Six: Generate and Style the QR Code
Now the code, and it should not be an anonymous black square.
You can set the pattern, the corner squares, the corner dots, the colours, and drop your logo into the middle at whatever size still scans.
Three practical rules learned the hard way:
- Keep the contrast strong. A pale code on a dark table under restaurant lighting is a code nobody scans.
- Do not shrink the logo slot until the code stops reading. Test after every change.
- Test on a cheap phone with a mediocre camera, not only on your own.
If the code is going on a thousand table tents, the QR code design is worth getting right once rather than reprinting.
Step Seven: Print It and Put It Everywhere
Table tents are the obvious place and the least ambitious one.
- Table tents and the inside of the bill folder
- The window, so people can read the menu before deciding to come in
- Delivery bags and takeaway boxes
- The link in your Instagram bio and on your Google listing
- Receipts, flyers, and the counter by the till
The delivery bag is the underrated one. Someone paid to introduce that customer to you. The code on the box is how the second order arrives without paying for the same introduction twice.
Static or Dynamic? Get This Right
A static QR code points at one fixed file forever. Change the menu and you reprint the code.
A dynamic code points at an address you control, so the printed square stays valid while the menu behind it changes as often as you like.
Only the second kind is worth printing. A code you have to reprint every time a price moves has reintroduced the exact problem you were trying to remove.
QRHUB’s QR platform features cover this side, including real-time updates behind a code that is already in print.
The Mistakes That Make QR Menus Fail
Almost all of them are avoidable, and almost all of them get made.
Pointing at a PDF. Pinching and zooming to read a price is worse than a paper menu, not better.
No options. If the guest cannot choose a size, they have to ask a person, which is what the code was supposed to prevent.
No photos. A text list on a phone reads like a spreadsheet.
Printing a static code. Now every price change is a print run.
Forgetting the currency. It happens on live menus more often than you would think, and bare numbers with no currency symbol look like a mistake because they are one.
No way to order. The whole point was to finish the job.
Step Eight: Turn It Into an Order
A menu that only displays is a brochure with a square on it. The last step is the checkout.
The guest browses, adds items with their options, verifies their number with a one-time code, and sends. The order arrives in your WhatsApp as one structured message with the total already worked out.
No POS integration. No merchant account. No payment gateway application. You settle the money by cash, card at the door, a payment link, or bank transfer, exactly as you do now.
Step Nine: Test It Like a Customer
Before you print a thousand of anything, run the menu the way a stranger would.
- Scan the code on a phone that is not yours, ideally an older one
- Order your most complicated dish, choosing every option
- Check the total is right before you send
- Send it, and look at what actually arrives in your WhatsApp
- Switch the menu to Arabic and scroll the whole thing on a phone
Then hand a phone to a member of floor staff who has not been trained on it and watch without helping. Whatever they get stuck on is what your guests will get stuck on, and it is nearly always something small that takes two minutes to fix.
Keeping It Current After Launch
The build is the easy part. Menus rot when nobody owns them.
Decide who is allowed to change prices before you go live, not after. If you run more than one branch, a manager can be given their own outlet without access to group pricing, which is usually the arrangement that survives contact with a busy month.
Set a habit of checking the menu against the kitchen once a week. Items that quietly stopped being made are the most common defect on live menus, and they cost you a refund and a review rather than just a correction.
What Does It Cost to Create a QR Code Menu?
Generating a code is free anywhere. Running a menu behind it is not.
- $29 per month, or $290 for the year, per outlet
- 0% commission on every order, permanently
- Every feature on every plan. No premium tier.
- 30 days free, no credit card
You can look at the current plan and everything included before you build anything.
Prices are current at the time of writing and are billed in USD.
How Long Does the Whole Thing Take?
With a spreadsheet ready and photos taken, an afternoon for a hundred-item menu.
Without photos, longer, and the photos are the part worth not rushing. A menu of text with no images will underperform one with pictures on every item, and that gap shows up in the order value rather than in anything you would notice.
30-day free trial. No credit card. 0% commission.
The Square Was Never the Hard Part
Anyone can make a QR code. Thousands of restaurants already did, and most of those codes still open a PDF that nobody enjoys reading.
Knowing how to create a QR code menu properly is mostly about what you build behind the square, and whether a hungry person holding a phone can finish what they started without asking anyone for help.
Build the menu first. The code takes ten seconds.