Walk into almost any quick-service restaurant or fast-casual chain today and you’ll notice something different from a decade ago: the menus are on screens, not printed boards. Digital menu boards have gone from a novelty to an industry standard — and for good reason. They directly impact the metrics restaurants care about most: average order value, speed of service, and operational efficiency.
But digital menus aren’t just for big chains with big budgets anymore. Cloud-based signage platforms have made them accessible to independent restaurants, cafés, and food trucks. Here’s how restaurants of all sizes are using digital signage to their advantage.
Static printed menus have a fundamental limitation: they’re frozen in time. Updating a price means reprinting and reshipping. Promoting a seasonal special means designing, printing, and physically installing a new board. Running a different menu for breakfast and lunch means either cramming everything onto one board or swapping them manually.
Digital menu boards solve all of these problems. Update a price from your laptop in seconds. Schedule the breakfast menu to display from 6 AM to 11 AM and the lunch menu to take over at 11:01 AM. Promote today’s special with an eye-catching image or video — and remove it tomorrow with a click.
One of the most powerful features for restaurants is daypart scheduling. Instead of displaying your full menu all day, you show customers exactly what’s available right now.
With IntelDisplay’s scheduling engine, you can set recurring rules for each daypart — breakfast, lunch, dinner, late night — and the system switches automatically. Schedules support overnight time spans (useful for late-night menus that run past midnight) and priority-based conflict resolution, so if two schedules overlap, the system knows which one takes precedence.
This isn’t just convenient; it drives sales. When customers see only the current menu, they make faster decisions, the line moves quicker, and upsell items get more prominent screen time during peak hours.
There’s a reason food photography is a profession. High-quality images of menu items displayed on a bright screen are significantly more effective at driving purchases than text on a printed board.
Restaurants using digital menu boards regularly report higher average order values after adding images and video to their displays. A looping video of a freshly made smoothie or a sizzling burger draws the eye in ways that text simply can’t.
IntelDisplay supports over 200 image formats and all major video codecs, so your content team can upload directly from their camera or editing software without worrying about file conversion. Files up to 3 GB are supported with chunked, resumable uploads — meaning even high-resolution menu videos upload reliably.
Many restaurants mount their menu boards in portrait orientation — especially behind the counter or in drive-through lanes where vertical space is more available than horizontal. IntelDisplay handles portrait displays natively, with automatic transcoding to ensure content looks sharp at resolutions up to 4K in either orientation.
This eliminates the need to produce separate portrait and landscape versions of your menu assets. Upload once, and the platform takes care of the rest.
For restaurants with multiple locations, keeping menus consistent is a constant challenge. With a cloud-based platform, you manage all your displays from a single dashboard. Push a price change to every location at once, or customize individual displays for locations with different offerings.
Each display registers to your account with a simple 6-character code — no on-site IT visit required. And because IntelDisplay caches content locally on each player device, your menus keep displaying even if the internet connection temporarily goes down. A 30-second heartbeat monitor lets you see the status of every screen across all locations in real time.
The financial barrier is lower than most restaurant owners expect. A consumer-grade Android TV or a small Android TV box costs well under $100. IntelDisplay runs $5 per display per month on annual billing, with 5 GB of storage per screen — more than enough for menu images and promotional videos.
Compare that to the ongoing cost of printing and shipping new menu boards every time you update a price, add a seasonal item, or run a promotion. Most restaurants recoup the cost of going digital within the first few months.
If you’re running a restaurant and still relying on printed menu boards, the switch to digital is one of the highest-ROI changes you can make. Start with a single screen behind the counter, upload your menu items, and set up a daypart schedule. You’ll see the difference in customer engagement from day one.
Get started with IntelDisplay and bring your menu to life.