How to Create Restaurant TV Menu Boards with Digital Signage

Digital menus are great for business; for both customers and staff. From providing visuals of your products to promoting special offers, digital menu boards are becoming ubiquitous for good reason.  

While we’ve written more about driving sales with your restaurant digital signage, in this guide we’ll be showing you how easy it is to get your content up on your screens with digital signage.

We’ll cover:

• How to create a menu screens for restaurants easily
• How to put your menu board design onto the TV screen in your restaurant or café
• How to schedule different digital menu displays for various restaurant sittings

And if you need inspiration, take a look at how Smoky Boys used ScreenCloud to attract more customers to their restaurant pop up.

Why use TV restaurant menu boards?

Digital menu displays allow you to change content as simply as entering a new product, or deleting an old one. The benefit of this is if you run out of a dish, you can remove it from all of your screens in just a few clicks. 

This means you can show customers all your restaurants' dishes without printing a bunch of menus or having staff handing them out. You can also highlight menu items like specials, meal promos, or even a new dish you're offering.

Digital menu boards can also help your customers make faster choices. create slides that delve more into the ingredients, or even the preparation methods can show which items are Kosher, Halal, or vegan, catering to each of these customer preferences.

But your restaurant signage menu board won't be limited to currently available dishes alone. Since it's dynamic, you can use your displays to get customers excited about upcoming menu additions, or promote other offers like loyalty programs or local events you're hosting.

Digital menu displays empower businesses in a variety of ways, and give you a cost-effective way to display not only your restaurant's menu but also any product or service you need to.

In summary, digital menu displays allow restaurants to:

• Instantly update menu items without reprinting menus.
• Highlight specials and or new dishes to boost sales.
• Provide information on dietary options like Kosher, Halal, or vegan.
• Promote attractions like special menus, local events, and loyalty programs.

Read more about digital signage for Quick Service Restaurants

How to create digital menu boards from scratch

To create a TV menu board, you'll need three things: TV screens (the digital menu board hardware), a media player (if you don't have a smart TV) and digital signage software.

Choosing a restaurant TV for your digital menu board

You can create a digital menu board with any TV, although you'll most likely need more than one. Most quick service restaurants and coffee shops use two or three screens for their digital menu boards, plus additional screens for window displays.

Digital menu board TVs start at around 32-34 inches (75-85cms) which is quite normal. However, you might want a larger screen if your menu is positioned behind a counter, or in a busy location.

If using a smart TV, you can easily connect it to a ScreenCloud account. Here's a quick video on how you can set up ScreenCloud on an Amazon TV.

Another factor to consider is whether you will be displaying menu content in landscape or portrait.

You might be able to get all of your menu items on two screens in landscape mode, but you might want to improve visibility by having less items displayed on more screens.

Linking multiple screens together in portrait mode can be an excellent way to segment specific menu items for easier display. For example, you night have burgers on one screen, another screen for fried chicken, sides on another and drinks on a fourth screen.

Choosing a media player for your TV menu board

Many TVs come with inbuilt streaming software, such as Samsung Tizen TVs, LG's webOS or SmartSign, Amazon's Fire TV or other Android TVs. These can easily connect with your digital signage software such as ScreenCloud by installing our app on the device itself.

But for better control over your screens, we recommend an affordable digital signage media player, like the ScreenCloud Pixi, Google Chromecast, or Xiaomi TV Box S (around $60), and plug it into the HDMI port on the back of your TV.

Or if you are looking for a more robust device that has better security and screen control, we suggest our Station P1 Pro device.

It's simple to setup your digital menu boards using your choice of consumer grade TV screens and ScreenCloud.

Use our Hardware Selector Tool to find out which TV screens and media players are best for your restaurant.

Setting up digital menu board software

You'll also need a digital menu board solution to power your displays. ScreenCloud is the professionals choice for digital signage solutions, offering easy setup and plenty of templates and apps to help you create amazing digital signage content.

While many businesses might opt for free software, there are limitations with the control and the quality of the connection and the security.

ScreenCloud is easy to use, effortlessly scalable, offers the best security on the market and comes packed with market leading features such as our Quick Post app for quick and easy content creation.

You'll also find integrations with popular apps and services, such as social media feeds, news feeds, menu templates and much more.

How to design your restaurant TV menu content

Armed with the right digital signage solution, you can easily create visually appealing digital menus for your TV that drive customer engagement. With ScreenCloud, you can choose to design a menu from scratch (or mimic your printed menu design) with Canvas, our Digital menu board app. 

Canvas

Canvas is an easy-to-use design editor tool that allows you to create screen-ready content quickly. It’s also one of the most-used apps on ScreenCloud. If you need inspiration, ScreenCloud has preloaded a series of templates for you to edit.

Read the Canvas app guide here.

Digital menu board app

The Digital Menu Board app is great for users with little design skills. It already contains templates for laying out your digital menu board, plus, since it's already connected to ScreenCloud, you can easily control your content on screen. 

When you need to change a product, you simply enter ScreenCloud, edit your template and the information changes on screen. 

Read the digital menu board app guide here. 

DSMENU app

DSMenu allows you to create and manage a menu board directly from the cloud. With a ton of different menu board designs to choose from such as "grill", "fast food", "pizza", "burger", "beverages", "festivals", "snacks" and "offers" to name but a few! The DSMENU user guide takes you through how to get set up in a few easy steps.

Firstly, you pick your menu board template (up to 199 to choose from), or decide to start from scratch. The menu boards are fully customizable, allowing you to add your own menu items, change colors and upload images.

Once happy with your masterpiece you can download it as a PNG or JPEG file, or grab your unique URL. Load this into ScreenCloud and you're ready to begin showing great digital menu boards on to your screens.

We have a more in depth guide on How to Create a Digital Menu Board here.

Canva

Popular editing tool Canva integrates easily with ScreenCloud, so you can create dynamic menu displays and add them straight to your screens.

Choose from any of the menu templates in Canva, customize and add dynamic elements as you need. And then simply share to your screen.

Step by step guide to display restaurant menu on TV

1. Pair your screens with ScreenCloud

Whether you're using a Smart TV or a media player, you'll need to install ScreenCloud. To do this, search for ScreenCloud Digital Signage Player and click install. Our app is available to download on Amazon, Android and Chrome devices.

Once you’ve got your Player app installed and running, you’ll be given a 6-character pairing code. Enter this in your studio account to pair your screen.

2. Upload or create your restaurant menu

Once your screens are paired you can add your digital menus. If you have designed a digital menu elsewhere, click on Media and then Upload. 

Now you can upload your files from wherever they’re saved - your computer, Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive and so on. ScreenCloud supports the majority of file types including jpeg, gif, png, and svg, PDFs and Office/iWorks formats to make uploading your content easier.

Anytime you need to make a change, or you update your restaurant menu, simply re-upload an image or make your changes within Canvas or your Menu Board app. This will change the content on your screens in real-time.

If you have multiple screens across multiple locations, as long as they’re connected to the same ScreenCloud account, you only need to follow the steps above once; any changes made will be reflected on all selected screens. This makes it easy to manage all of your restaurant TV screens from one system.

3. Schedule menu boards for your restaurant

Once you have created your restaurant menus they'll be present in your Media Library within ScreenCloud.

As an example, you could create different menus to cover breakfast to dinner, including happy hours and meal deals. Add these menus to a Playlist and set them to your screen.

As you don’t want your breakfast menu to show during dinner service, or your cocktails at breakfast, you can schedule what content shows when.

Click into the menu you wish to schedule, then Availability. By clicking on Enable availability you can then set the date and time you wish that content to show on your screen. This is great for scheduling on-going yet time-sensitive promotions without having to manually remember to take it up and down. 

Create your own TV menu board with ScreenCloud

It's really easy to create a digital signage menu board in your restaurant with readily available hardware. It can also be much more affordable and less hassle than printing paper menus or updating menu items on a whiteboard.

All you'd need is an inexpensive media player + digital signage software and you're ready to go.

Sign up for a 14-day free trial with ScreenCloud, and see why 10,000+ businesses trust us to provide seamless digital signage solutions.