A New Normal for Menus: Sanitized or Recycled

**** CALL TO ACTION: If you are in the restaurant industry or lobby for its well being, please share this with your contacts and help get this message to your state restaurant associations and Governors immediately! If restaurants are to survive COVID-19 the wording of every new restriction imposed on operators must be carefully considered.

COVID-19 has already had a devastating impact on the restaurant industry world wide. Many operators will struggle to reopen their doors once they are allowed. When they do, they will have to endure reduced guest volume, new health standards, and a new normal we can't even predict yet.

As I write this, discussions have begun regarding what kind of changes will be needed to ensure public safety so that restaurants can reopen soon. At the top of that list is the notion of disposable, single-use menus. That sounds simple enough, but what politicians and even many restaurant operators themselves fail to realize is that not all menus are printed on paper and how expensive and wasteful the practice of printing menus already is.

For ten years I've been encouraging the movement away from paper menus to tablet-based digital menus in most full service restaurants. There is a long list of operational advantages in doing so, but for the moment I'll concentrate on the most important ones – Cost and Guest Safety.

For restaurants who edit and reprint their menus at least quarterly (a typical frequency for full service concepts) it is already more cost effective to switch to tablet menus that can be constantly revised at a fixed cost and eliminate printing altogether. In my experience, most restaurant owners/operators fail to appreciate how expensive their menu costs are until they have reason to look more closely. They are usually shocked to learn they spend $500-$1,000 every month just printing their menus. If COVID-19 causes a tenfold increase in this cost because they have to give every customer a new menu and recycle them after each use, especially with reduced traffic, they will struggle to generate a profit!

On the other hand, a tablet-based digital menu can be easily sanitized between every use. It can also be changed daily or on the fly as menu changes are needed. Since it is likely the supply chain will also be disrupted by COVID-19, operators will need to make a lot of changes to what they offer in the months ahead. Simply put, digital menus were a better solution before COVID-19, but now they are practically a necessity. It is nonsensical for restaurants go on printing and recycling menus every day!

I fear that my intentions for writing this will be misinterpreted as someone looking to profit off of a tragedy. This is not the case. I have clients all over the country for whom I've reduced or suspended their monthly fees for using our digital menu platform and in the true spirit of partnership I've aligned my own fate with theirs – living on zero income and hoping the restaurant industry can return to normal soon. My intention is to encourage both politicians and restaurant operators to think carefully about the future as they make decisions moving forward. Before a governor writes an executive order stating "Restaurant must recycle menus after every use" they need to be aware some menus can be sanitized instead of recycled. A more appropriate message would be "Laminated and digital menus should be sanitized and paper menus should be recycled after every use." I don't expect Governors to become champions for digital menus, but I also don't want them forcing the restaurant industry to double down on the already outdated, disadvantaged, and financially and environmentally wasteful practice of printing menus when there is already a more cost effective, efficient, and healthier solution that has been proven for nearly a decade.

Sincerely,

Eric Arsenault

President – Interactive Menu Technologies