Taking the printed menu away changes more than printing costs. It changes how fast you can move a price, what you can say about an allergen, whether a dish has a photograph, and how the room feels to somebody who came out for dinner rather than to use their phone. Worth being honest about all four before deciding.
Prices and dishes stop being an afternoon's work
This is the real change. A price rise, a sold-out dish or a special becomes an edit that is live before you have put the phone down, across every table at once. Rooms that change a menu weekly get most of the value here; rooms with a fixed card that has not moved in two years get almost none, and should say so rather than buying it anyway.
Allergens on a restaurant digital menu: easier, and the responsibility is the same
A digital menu can carry the full allergen information per dish without turning the card into a wall of text, which is genuinely better than a footnote and a laminated folder behind the bar. What it does not do is change who is responsible for it being right. If anything the ease of editing makes a stale entry more likely, so it needs the same check as the printed one did.
What the room loses when QR menus replace the card
Some guests dislike it, particularly older ones and anyone who came out to be away from a screen. A table where four people are all looking at phones reads differently from one where they are passing a card around. The rooms that handle this well keep a small stack of paper menus and offer one without making it a negotiation, and they lose nothing by it.
Questions people ask about digital menu
Does a digital menu have to be a menu app?
No, and it is better if it is not. A page that opens in the browser from a code works on every phone and asks nothing of the guest. A menu app is a download between a hungry person and their dinner.
What does a digital menu system cost compared to printing?
The comparison is the cards you print once against the menus you reprint at every change. The sheet on this site does that sum from your own figures; on its worked example the codes cost £20.40 and the printing they replace is £336.00 a year.
Do I still need paper menus?
Keep some. A handful covers the guests who want one and costs almost nothing, and the saving still holds because it comes from stopping the reprint run rather than from having no paper at all.
Is a digital menu ordering system, or QR code menu ordering, the same thing as a digital menu?
No, and the difference is what happens after the guest has read it. A digital menu is the card on a page you edit: prices, dishes and allergens, with nothing leaving the table. An ordering system takes the order from that page and puts it in the kitchen's queue, which is a second product at a second price, with a setting that decides whether the kitchen can make what has just been sold. Plenty of rooms want the first and not the second, and the sheet on this site prices the card on its own.