Café Menu Board on a TV: How to Set One Up

Most cafés already own the hardest part of a digital menu board: a TV. What's usually missing is a way to put the menu on it that doesn't involve a USB stick, a ladder, and re-doing the whole thing every time the price of oat milk changes. This is the short version of how to do it properly.

What a café menu board needs to do

• Be readable from the queue. Big type, few items per screen, prices aligned. Six to eight items per board is the comfortable limit.
• Change by time of day. Breakfast until 11, lunch after, maybe a cake-and-coffee board for the afternoon lull.
• Be editable from the counter. A price change should take a minute on a phone, not a visit from whoever set it up.
• Keep running. If the Wi-Fi drops during the morning rush, the board must not go blank.

The hardware

Any TV with an HDMI input works. Behind it you need a small player: an Android TV box is the cheapest and simplest for a wall-mounted TV, a Raspberry Pi is the quiet, low-power option, and a spare laptop or mini PC running Windows, macOS or Linux works too. Install the free CastWize player, enter the pairing code in Studio, and the screen is online. The full shopping list is in Set Up a Screen for Under $200.

The layout

Start from a template rather than a blank slide. The free templates include a coffee menu, a breakfast menu and a lunch menu in the same style, so the switch between them looks intentional. Put your own items, prices and hours on them. A few design rules that hold up:

• One menu per slide. Breakfast and lunch are two slides, not one crowded one.
• Dark background, light text, prices in a second colour. It reads from four metres away.
• A photo of one drink beats photos of ten. Use the specials slide for the picture.
• If you want a promo or your Instagram feed next to the menu, use a two-zone layout rather than squeezing it onto the menu slide.

The schedule

This is the part that saves the time. Put the breakfast menu in one playlist and the lunch menu in another, then add schedule rules to the screen: Breakfast 06:00–11:00, Lunch 11:00–15:00, and a default playlist for the rest of the day. The board switches at 11:00 every day with nobody touching it. A weekend brunch menu is one more rule, limited to Saturday and Sunday.

Changing a price

Open the slide in Studio on your phone, edit the price, press Publish. Screens on that playlist update within seconds. Seasonal specials get a start and end date, so the pumpkin latte comes down in November without anyone remembering.

What it costs

The software is $5 per screen per month with every feature included, and the first screen is free for 30 days with no credit card. A café with a counter board and a window screen pays $10 a month. The pricing guide covers what the hardware adds. For more on what cafés and restaurants put on screen, see digital signage for restaurants.

Frequently asked questions