Menu
A digital and printed menu card for Qwetu dishes
Introduction
Menus are an important communication tool that affects customer behavior. It’s a list of food and
drinks that is offered to the customers and their prices. A menu is now commonly used by both
large and small hotels, cafes and restaurants. The physical features of the menu give the
customer a unique message about the business. Many factors such as the appearance, design,
cover, paper quality, color, material, weight, and the condition (as in clean or dirty) of the menu
contribute to the customer’s first impression of the restaurant. It plays a big role as it gives a
summary of all the items offered by the hotel. Today menus are also found online, this offers a
customer an opportunity to order food or drinks without necessarily going to the hotels. This
concept paper explains how effective technology has enhanced menu creation by giving different
ways by which technology has transformed menus, in the case of a QR code that enables
customers to scan the code and get the items offered without necessarily having to view a printed
paper that has a list of the items. This report gives a guide line on how it is critical to make the
menu’s both the external and the internal design in a way that can meet the customer’s
expectations and impress them.
Background
Qwetu hotel is a small scale hotel located in Nairobi, Eastleigh constituency. It was started in the
year 2019 January by a group of young men aging between 26-35 years. It offers a variety of
food stuffs that favor the people in the community. Qwetu hotel offers vegetables, cereals,
chapati’s, meat cow’s and goat’s, tea and ugali which are among the most common food stuff
ordered. The hotel uses a prtinted paper menu which is black in color generally with words
written in white colors. Due to the high cost of printing and lack of durability of these printed
paper menu the hotel introduced digital menus which however favor the customers who have
smartphones as they can scan the QR codes and order what they need but act as a disadvantage to
the ones who lack such phones and as result the printed paper menus are still used but are in
small numbers.
Objectives
1) To determine how effective digitalization has affected the evaluation of qwetu dishes
hotel
2) To determine the major challenges faced by Qwetu dishes as they have adopted to digital
menu cards.
3) To determine the effectiveness of using QR codes in the printed menu cards.
To find out the positive results brought up by using both printed and digital menus.
Target audience
The community where the hotel is found is made up of different segments of people. It has the
old 60-80, youths 20-35 and the young ones 10-19 years. The youths and the old are the main
customers. The youths are large in number and have adapted to the new menu system as they
possess smartphones while the old still use the printed menus though some possess smartphones.
As a result to the introduction of digital menus this has influenced the ordering of foodstuffs
online as the platforms also offers online ordering. The children are also common customers as
they brought by their parents.
Design elements
The printed menu will be grey in color generally with words written in color and in arial
rounded mt bold fonts and 30 in size, the borders will be orange in color. The paper will be a
8.5” by 11” in size, the name Qwetu dishes will appear at the top written in Broadway font and
orange in color, the description will be 30 in size and white in color, it will appear after the
name, it will include the ingredients, there will be a list of ingredients in each dish the
ingredients will be specific; example not saying rice but pilau or white rice. The description will
also include describing how the dishes are cooked here, there will be use of small descriptors to
describe each ingredient. There will craftsmanship where the menu describes the whole cooking
process. There will also be photos of each dish in different categories. The drinks category will
be blue in color, the fruits category will be yellow in color, the meat category will be red in
color, the cereals category will be in light green in color, the vegetables will be green in color
and the other foodstuff categories will be brown in color. The spaces between each dish will be
aqua in color. The pricing of each dish will appear on the right side that is the opposite side of
each dish. The QR code will appear at the bottom left of the printed menu this will enable the
customer to access the digital menu and also download the Qwetu dishes app.
Budget
Requirements costs
Professional printing 50
Editing software designer 3000
Graphic designer 3000
Printing paper 1000
Professional photographer 2500
Total 9550