Most hotels build a QR menu the hard way: they start from the printed menu of one restaurant, copy it into a screen, and then discover they have to do the whole thing again for the pool bar, the à-la-carte and room service — the same club sandwich typed four times, translated four times, corrected four times. There is a calmer way, and it comes from building in the right order. In Avdena, a menu is not one long list; it is a shared pool of products, organised by categories, and shown in venues. Get that order right and a hotel-wide menu across many outlets stops being a copy-paste marathon. This guide walks through the setup, step by step.
Step 1 — Build the product pool, not the menu
Begin with the thing itself: the product. Before you think about which restaurant shows what, you create each dish and drink once, in a single shared pool that belongs to the whole property. A club sandwich, an espresso, a house lemonade — each exists one time, with its name, description, photograph, allergens and nutrition. This is the change that saves everything downstream: because the espresso lives in the pool, not inside “Lobby Bar,” it can appear in the lobby bar, the pool bar and room service without being retyped. Define it well once, and every venue draws from the same clean source.
Step 2 — Organise with categories
A pool of products needs structure, and that is what categories give you. Avdena supports three levels of category, so you can go from a broad heading down to a fine grouping — Drinks, then Hot Drinks, then Coffee, for instance — as deeply as your menu needs and no deeper. Categories are shared too: you build the tree once and reuse it, so the way “Starters” or “Cocktails” is defined stays consistent wherever it appears. Good categories are what turn a flat list into a menu a guest can actually navigate on a phone.
Step 3 — Place products into venues
Now the menu takes shape per outlet. Every service point is a venue — a Restaurant or a Bar — with its own theme, its own QR codes and its own permissions. You create a venue for each place a guest orders (the main restaurant, the lobby bar, the pool bar, room service) and then place products from the shared pool into it. The pool bar shows its drinks and light bites; the à-la-carte shows its full carte; room service shows what the kitchen sends at night — all drawing from the same products you defined once. Change a product’s photo in the pool and it updates in every venue that shows it, at the same time.
Step 4 — Let AI do the heavy lifting
Filling a menu by hand is where projects stall, so let the assistant carry the load. As you add a product, you type its name and AI auto-fill proposes the rest — a description, the likely allergens, the ingredients, a portion and calorie estimate — and translates everything into the five guest languages. You review, edit and approve; nothing goes live unless you confirm it. One line is worth stating plainly: the AI never sets prices. It speeds up the descriptive and nutritional work, but the commercial decisions stay entirely yours. What used to be an afternoon of typing per outlet becomes a quick pass of checking and approving.
Step 5 — Design the QR once, print once
With the menu in place, you design the code that opens it. Avdena’s QR is not a plain black square: you add your logo, your colours and a frame, so the code on the table looks like it belongs to the hotel. Then comes the point that saves the most money over time — print once, update forever. The QR carries a fixed address; the menu behind it can change every day, but the printed sticker on the table never has to. A new dish, a corrected allergen, a hidden price for the all-inclusive season, a menu scheduled to switch from breakfast to lunch — all of it happens in the panel, and not one table code is reprinted.
Go live with Avdena
Put in order, the whole setup is short: build the product pool, organise it with categories, place products into each venue, let AI fill the detail under your approval, and design a branded QR you print once. From there the menu is live in five languages, with allergen and nutrition information, payment-free ordering and per-venue service modes — all under your own brand and across every location from one panel. To start, see our QR Menu page, and plan the menu alongside the rest of your guest touchpoints through QR Content Management.