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With phyllo-pastry-thin margins in the restaurant segment, even a 1–2% increase in sales can turn a food service business from a survivor into a thriver. This is why we see the exponential adoption of digital menu boards across major QSR chains—they help drive the bottom line through cost-saving and boosting sales.
A WAND Digital study proves that a single-location digital board increases sales by 2%. In fact, other industry research boasts even more ambitious gains of 3–5%, so it’s safe to assume that a rise in incremental sales of 2% is a guaranteed bare minimum.
According to a 360 Research Reports overview, the hospitality digital signage market size is set to grow at an ambitious CAGR of 6.83% from $2.476 billion in 2021 to $3.68 billion by 2027.
This growth is only natural. Digital menu boards for restaurants enable the growth of many KPIs, feeding the bottom line in a dozen ways through upselling and saving techniques.
Let’s review key advantages and types of digital signage hardware and software solutions for QSR, fine dining restaurants, and casual dining outlets.
What Is a Digital Menu Board?
A digital menu board is a plasma display screen with a media player, and a digital menu software solution, used to display colorful dynamic interactive menus in restaurants.
They can be deployed on a cloud and on-premise. The screens range in size, with the popular solution 32–52 inches.
Digital signage displays can be fully integrated with the back-of-the-house POS system. Depending on the application, the most popular hardware solutions are:
- Indoor digital menu boards
- Self-service kiosk
- Outdoor drive-through solutions
How Do Digital Menu Boards Work?
Digital signage for a restaurant menu in QSR is usually mounted above the counter so that users can see their meal options as they order with cashiers. The mounted screens are equipped with HDMI ports that connect them to the media player. So they can upload, update, and play the content with the help of digital signage software.
Benefits of Digital Menu Board for Business
Customers love having lots of choices, but they also love an easy ordering process—enter the menu paradox. The key benefit and mission of a digital menu board are to overcome this paradox by reducing visual crowding and improving shopability.
Let’s consider other key advantages businesses enjoy when switching from menu to digital signage.
Cost Efficiency
Physical signs need to be designed, printed, delivered, and mounted in each outlet. If your chain runs monthly promotions, that amounts to a neat annual investment times the number of outlets in your chain.
Even though digital menu hardware for restaurants requires a sizeable upfront investment, business owners get to enjoy savings throughout the year when updating the promotions with only a few clicks across the chain.
Higher Average Check
Due to a mix of factors such as high-quality imagery, UX-driven design, colors, visual hierarchy, and rotating time-bound messages, operators can boost their average check with digital menu board installation.
Tim Hortons in Canada managed to increase their average check by 25 cents after installing a digital panel in each of its 2,100 locations.
QSR chains can boost their bottom line by giving visual prominence to high-margin items and upselling.
Increased Efficiency
Restaurant operators appreciate the added efficiency to the outlet’s workflow as they can update menus and pricing in real-time and save resources on manual updates, printing, and delivery.
Improved Customer Experience
Digital menus provide customers with an engaging and visually appealing experience that helps their decision-making and reduces the cognitive load.
QSR visitors often find themselves in a loud and crowded environment, with additional pressure from the other “hangry” people in line behind them. This situation makes comprehensive menus even more critical to the visitors’ overall experience.
As levels of cognitive perception are naturally reduced in a high-stress environment with lots of distractions and physical feelings of hunger, proper menu design helps navigate decision-making. This is why designers make sure that dishes are clustered in menus with visual references and prices are all displayed in a user-friendly manner.
In fact, 74% of customers report effective menu displays as their top priority when ordering from a restaurant.
Real-time Inventory Management
The ability to redirect your sales away from the items running out of stock is another way digital signage tools help restaurants’ overall profitability.
For example, Tama Looney, Brand Analytics & Customer Engagement executive with Xenial, reasons that adopting a technology early can help operators thrive under crises. “Maybe they had an inventory management system that tied to their digital menu boards,” she says. “So, when the supply chain was disrupted and they ran out of tomatoes, they could easily swipe anything that had tomatoes to clear it from their digital menus.”
Leverage Automation
The best digital menu board systems have a few functions that can be programmed to trigger automatically. For example, outlets can program their software to promote overstocked items or even show frozen drinks when it’s hot outside.
Brand Consistency
Digital menus provide a consistent branding experience across all locations, ensuring that customers have the same experience at each location. Digital menus reinforce the QSR chain’s brand identity, which can lead to increased customer loyalty.
Easy Onboarding & Management
Digital signage software solutions are usually rather intuitive and offer built-in advertising campaign management tools. The user-friendly design makes these software solutions easy for new members of management and administration to adopt.
Personalized Upselling
Once the customer orders a main dish at the drive-through, a screen display can also help them with pairing suggestions. These side order prompts can be based on historical statistics of the most frequently purchased combinations or even on the customer’s personal order history [provided the license plate number is part of the customer profile and cameras are used to read them at the drive-through].
What Makes Digital Boards Popular for QSR Chains?
QSR chains use every leverage available to become the spot of choice for the next meal of one of the biggest addressable markets out there.
Using modern-looking visually pleasing signage is one way to provide the touchless multi-channel experience customers are used to. These aspects factor in:
High Level of Disruption at the Counter
Order-taking time is critical for QSRs. Not only could they lose immediate passersby who don’t feel like standing in a long line during rush hour for a burger, but also lose that customer’s LTV.
Well-designed intuitive digitized menus decrease the wait time, driving more sales in the short term and over the long term.
Limited Menu of Popular Items
Unlike fine dining restaurants, QSRs rely on a limited menu assortment that can be prepared quickly. While fitting a 20-page wine menu would be cumbersome on a screen, it’s easy to fit desserts and drinks on one screen for a quick service outlet.
Distinct Mealtimes Changes: Automated Dayparting
The breakfast menu is quite distinct from the lunch and dinner menus so changing the offering automatically based on time is now taken for granted in the industry. And no user interaction is required for the menu change during the day as the dayparting feature helps to program change based on time while considering differences in time zones.
Consistency of Customer Service Across the Chain
Consistency across the outlets of a single QSR chain is critical—customers need to feel at home when frequenting their favorite fast-food outlet. Digital signage software synched across the chain allows for adding an extra level of consistency to drive customer loyalty.
Wholesale Savings
The installation, maintenance, and integration of digital signage systems for many outlets are way more economic endeavors because you get wholesale discounts on hardware purchases, software licensing, design services, and installation crew works.
Menu maintenance services are another opportunity to save marketing budgets. The Dev.Pro team has experience in managing menus for the world’s leading QSR chain, providing world-class services at reasonable rates. In fact, with remote work being the norm now, it’s wise to outsource menu maintenance to a reliable supplier.
Key Features of the Digital Menu Board
Hardware digital menu displays can be indoor and outdoor. Usually, outdoor digital screens feature enclosures designed to protect them from adverse weather conditions and vandalism. They also feature inherently higher brightness, with antireflective filters for visibility in high sunlight conditions.
Software for digital menu boards can be vendor made and custom, with bigger QSR chains opting to develop their own custom digital signage software for better integration with POS and inventory management modules.
These are some of the fundamental features of digital signage CMS:
- Cloud-based deployment for remote management of multiple endpoint systems.
- Flexible licensing with monthly subscription plans or one-time payment when purchased with hardware.
- Automated dayparting to easily program different menus for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
- Widget management feature allows users to embed different widgets, like weather, YouTube, company’s Facebook or Twitter, RSS feed, calendar, and clock into the design by selecting pre-programmed design options.
- Digital signage scheduler allows users to automate the change of design elements on the screen in line with mealtimes, promotions, and even weather conditions [e.g., showing ice cream promos when the temperature outside goes above a certain point].
- Dashboards in this CMS can provide both the monitoring and alerting system of the technical health [connectivity status] and the data on outlets running customized vs. chain-wide messages, for example.
- Pricing module allows for changing pricing in bulk or by individual outlets as well as scheduling price changes at specific time by percent or dollar value.
- The promotion management feature will have settings to program specific food and drink items to be featured at discounted prices, applying BOGO, % off, seasonal and free delivery offers.
- Calorie management is another set of fields in digital menu board software development. To stay FDA compliant, food service operators can advise customers about the calorie value of specific items on the menu.
- Seamless integration with POS, inventory, and loyalty management systems.
- Digital menu board template library will include a set of head-office-approved designs for every occasion for dynamic and static ads, promotions, upsells, and menus.
Top Criteria for Choosing Digital Menu Boards
When choosing digital menu boards consider these factors:
- Existing Tech Stack
Is your POS system custom or vendor made? What kind of integration is possible with your POS? Does your POS vendor also have digital signage solutions on offer? Is your R&D department laboring on a custom build digital signage software that will be unique to your chain?
In the best-case scenario, a digital menu board will interface with the POS, loyalty system, and inventory management solution, so you need to consider the compatibility of these elements.
- Number of Outlets
The more outlets you have, the better pricing you will enjoy across the board: from licensing to installation. Many digital board suppliers will have turnkey solutions and contractors for this type of job in every state or major cities.
The rollout plan needs to be coordinated in terms of hardware mounting and software integrations. We recommend that a smaller outlet becomes a trial unit for both procedures so that any hiccups have minimal effect while procedures are being smoothed out between the purchasing, operational, marketing, IT departments as well as suppliers and installation crews.
- Types of Screens
When procuring the digital signage for restaurants, consult a few vendors on the most efficient purchasing list for your specific outlets. How many digital screens above the counter do you need? What about drive-through? Any touch-screen self-ordering kiosks?
The important factor to consider here will be the level of digital transformation of the food service outlets in your neighborhood as your clients may be accustomed to a certain level of digital exposure and the convenience it brings along. Lacking these run-of-the-mill digital commodities may be critical for customer loyalty and sales.
So, if you know that your competitor across the road has two touch-screen self-ordering kiosks to decrease the wait time during rush hour, not having one may eventually eat into your lunch sales because people don’t have much time to waste.
- Deployment
Is your POS system and restaurant management software ecosystem cloud-based, on-premises, or a hybrid solution?
There are many affordable SaaS signage software systems, but if your entire restaurant still runs on legacy solutions, you may have technical hiccups connecting it to cloud-based software. Needless to say, cloud deployment of software is the norm for many leading foodservice operators nowadays.
- Licensing
Companies that create digital menu board software may have different pricing strategies. And those strategies can be monthly and annual payments depending on the number of screens or one-time payment solutions.
You can purchase hardware and software separately as most leading manufacturers of digital screens will be compatible with leading POS solutions.
- Customer Support
Check out customer support capabilities when selecting a vendor. Are they 24/7? How far from your main location are they based, and does the time zone impact the service? Is there a technical line available around the clock? Also, learn what existing clients have to say about the support and the product in reviews and use cases.
- Regional Particulars
Most solutions are designed with English language and USD as the base settings. But if you are outside of the English-speaking zone, make sure that the solution meets your local legal and financial requirements, or consider checking out some of the local products.
For example, interfaces in Japanese, Arabic, and Chinese languages may need double-checking. Also, like the FDA requirement to specify the calorie values next to a food item, some legal frameworks need the weight of the dish specified. Ensure that your software candidates on the shortlist can accommodate these regional particulars.
When it comes to choosing the digital menu board hardware, outlets in high humidity areas by the seashore and places with long winters, like Canada, may need to discuss these climate particulars for special protection for outdoor devices.
- Warranty and Service Terms
It’s also a good idea to ensure that your warranty is in line with industry standards or market averages.
When preparing your shortlist, create a separate column for the warranty comparison, specifically if your outdoor displays are going to be functioning in extreme climate conditions and need regular servicing against sands, high humidity, and low temperatures.
Digital Menu Boards Manufacturers
These are some of the leading digital board menu companies, and most provide both hardware and software systems.
- NEC Corporation
- Goodview
- TouchBistro
- NCR Corporation
- Mvix
- Fastsigns
- Dai Nippon Printing
- Coates Group
- Samsung
- Daktronics
- Cineplex Digital Media
- Stratacache (Scala)
- LG Electronics
- NoviSign
It’s also common for bigger QSR chains to outsource their menu maintenance to a software integration company with restaurant expertise. Dev Pro has a team of experienced professionals who provide turnkey menu maintenance services from integration and design to scheduling and updates.
Conclusions
When selecting digital signage software and hardware for your restaurants, get quotes and specifications from a few major vendors based on a thoroughly selected short list of key regional players.
Your shortlist will create a better awareness of the technical particulars and specifications of the products available on the market for informed decision-making.
